Jezail

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Jezail (Sometimes Jezzail from the Pashto language) is an Afghan matchlock or flintlock musket fired from a forked rest.

The Jezail is most famous, at least in Western literature, as the weapon which wounded Dr. Watson - the fictional biographer of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes - in the Battle 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 from Kabul to Jalalabad 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.

[edit] External links

• UK National Maritime Museum: Jezail Rifle with photo