_Cavalry._ _Infantry._ _Artillery._ _Guns._ 9750 30,890 1600 182 IRREGULARS. _Tribal foot._ _Tribal horse._ _Total._ 9000 7500 58,740 Weak in artillery--there being few trained gunners--the cannon, partly of English, partly of native manufacture and of various ages and patterns, were the time-honoured relics of Dost Mahommed and Shir Ali. The infantry rifles of the regulars also were of different makes, varying from the old two-grooved Brunswick to the Martini-Henry. The tribal forces were largely armed with matchlocks. Assisted by the subsidies which he received from the Government of India, Abdur Rahman swept away the rubbish and collected an immense stock of modern ordnance supplies. Over and above the quantity held against the immediate mobilisation of the standing forces, by importation and manufacture he piled up a vast reserve of rifles, field-pieces and guns of large calibre with their requisite ammunition, doubtless very varied in their character and including every sort of pattern from Krupp field-pieces to Maxim, Nordenfeldt and Hotchkiss quick-firers. For this purpose he erected in Kabul itself the necessary works, imparting to the position of Afghanistan by these means and for the first time in its history some element of security, and creating an army which required only to be supervised with the same watchfulness by his successor to attain ultimately as near to perfection as any purely native organisation can arrive. Ordnance factories--with a weekly output of two guns, one hundred and seventy-five rifles and a varying quantity of small arms ammunition--workshops, and an arsenal existing to-day in Kabul prove the inflexible determination of his plans. In furtherance of them, it was his idea to fashion an army which, apportioned between regulars and tribal levies, would number 1,000,000 men. There was to be a permanent regular force of 300,000 men, with an established ammunition reserve of 500 rounds to each field-piece and 5000 rounds to every rifle. Moreover, many months before his death the ordnance supplies, amassed in Kabul, sufficed for a very large proportion of such a force, at the same time exceeding the amount necessary for the requirements of the existing field and garrison forces. Had Abdur Rahman only survived a few years longer, it is indisputable that a force of a million fighting men, more or less trained but at least efficiently armed, would have been secured, although it may be doubted whether, save under the press of dire necessity, he would have ventured to issue weapons to them or to place more than a quarter of this number actually in the field.