- Jezail
The Jezail (Sometimes "Jezzail" from the Pashto language ) is an Afghanmatchlock orflintlock musket fired from a forked rest.Features
The jezail is a simple, cost-efficient and often hand-made musket common to Central Asian and some Middle Eastern Muslim lands of the time. The stocks, barrels, and other simple components were often hand made and sometimes beautifully decorated. The more complex parts were often taken from damaged foreign muskets, most notably the British
Brown Bess . Jezails usually have what seem to be unusually long barrels and of a higher calibre than other frontier guns - as a result of their purely military use. Some jezails are rifled. The jezail was fired using a horn bipod, and it has been speculated that the highly curved stock was tucked under the arm and cradled tightly against the body, as opposed to being held to the shoulder like a standard musket or rifle. Typical jezails were effective at 500 yards.The Jezail in the Anglo-Afghan Wars
During this period the jezail was the primary ranged weapon of Afghan warriors and was used with great effect against British troops. British Brown Bess smoothbore muskets were effective at only 150 yards and accurate at 50 yards. Because of their advantage in range, Afghan rebels typically used the jezail from the tops of cliffs along valleys and defiles during ambushes. This tactic repeatedly devastated the British during their doomed retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad.
In the
First Anglo-Afghan War the British established a cantonment outside of Kabul with dirt walls approximately waist high. Surrounding the cantonment were several abandoned forts which, although out of range of British muskets, were close enough for jezail fire. Whenghazi and other Afghan forces besieged Kabul and the cantonment, they occupied the forts and used them to snipe British forces from a safe range.Despite the advantages over the Brown Bess, British forces were typically able to defeat jezail armed Afghans when they fought on relatively flat terrain.
The Jezail in British Literature
The jezail is most famous, at least in Western literature, as the weapon which wounded
Dr. Watson - the fictional biographer of the fictional detectiveSherlock Holmes - in theBattle of Maiwand during his military service in Afghanistan.The jezail weapon was also mentioned in the
George MacDonald Fraser adventure "Flashman", whose protagonist describes the awful slaughter of British Army troops retreating fromKabul toJalalabad by Afghan jezailchis.It is used as a metaphor of a cheap and primitive weapon in
Rudyard Kipling 's poetry describing British casualties in colonial wars: :"A scrimmage in a Border Station":"A canter down some dark defile":"Two thousand pounds of education":"Drops to a ten-rupee jezail."References
** Tanner, Stephen, (2002) "Afghanistan: A Military History From Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban", Da Capo Press, ISBN 0-306-81233-9
External links
* UK National Maritime Museum: [http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/collectionsDetail.cfm?ID=AAA2546 Jezail Rifle with photo]
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