Proposed by Lieutenant-Colonel C. B. Le Mesurier in 1877, the new portable 'screw gun' saw its first action in the Afghan War during the Zaimukht expedition in December 1879. Le Mesurier wasn't there to see the guns in action, but he did serve in the Afghan War on staff at Kandahar. Rudyard Kipling's poem, 'Screw Guns' (1890) heightened their fame.

Private Richard Brown, a gunner in the Royal Artillery who saw action at Ahmed Khel, is one of the minor suspects as being Jack the Ripper, the infamous serial killer of late-1880s London. Shortly after resigning from the Metropolitan Police, he committed suicide in Hyde Park, one week after the last Ripper murder.

The Second Anglo-Afghan War was one of the earliest campaigns where British soldiers wore khaki in large numbers. As khaki-manufactured uniforms were not common, the soldiers had to make their own by dying their white summer uniforms with a variety of substances, including coffee, tea, curry powder, and all kinds of dyes - resulting in whole companies marching out in a variety of shades - from bright yellow to dark brown.

There were many variations of the British uniform on display in Afghanistan, but perhaps the most bizarre sight to greet 3,000 attacking Afghans at Ali Khel one night was that of Captain O' Moore Creagh, who joined in the defence of the British camp with no time to change into his usual uniform - bedecked in a pair of pink silk pyjamas.

When the Amir, Yakub Khan, turned up at Gandamak to sign the treaty that ended the first campaign, he came with his own Highland guard - Afghan soldiers in red tunics and kilts patterned with a 'tartan' of red and white checks, though they wore pantaloons underneath and no sporran. Rather than impress the British soldiers, they were more a point of curious amusement.

When the British took control of the Sherpur cantonment at Kabul in October 1879, they found abandoned within it the entire Afghan reserve artillery, consisting of seventy-two guns and mortars. The most interesting was an old Dutch brass gun dated '1625'.

Captain Robert Warburton served in the Afghan War as a Political Officer in the Khyber Pass. While his father was British, his mother was an Afghan Princess, a niece of the Amir Dost Muhammad. His half-brother, John Paul Warburton (real name Jahan Dad Khan), became known as 'the greatest detective of nineteenth century India'.

This text has appeared on a handful of 'on this day' entries across the web, for 12 April 1879:

"Captain Creagh of the Indian Army began a ten day defence of the village of Kam Dakka near Kabul..."

The date is incorrect, it was 22nd April 1879, and it was not ten days long - the action lasted from about 5.30am until late afternoon on the same day. And just to be really pedantic, the action was not a defence of the village (Creagh and his men were defending themselves from within a cemetery outside the village).

Another 'on this day' website posts the following for April 19th 1880:

"The Times war correspondent telephones a report of the Battle of Ahmed Khel, the first time news is sent from a field of battle in this manner."

Actually the first news of the battle of Ahmed Khel was sent the following day from Ghazni by heliograph (using a mirror to flash sunlight in morse-code) to General Ross 50 miles away. The news was then sent to India and then the Indo-European Telegraph via Teheran to be reported in the late edition of The Times on April 23rd, and more fully on the 24th. General Stewart laid no wires on his march from Kandahar to Ghazni, so telegraphic communication from the field of battle would not have been possible.

The following line concerning the Bala Hissar, the great fort at Kabul, appeared in The Sunday Times in Feb 2007:

"The fort is in ruins, destroyed by British troops in 1879 in retaliation for the murder of the British envoy."