French Cuirassier WWI

The Carassiers were the French heavy cavalry. Now the boots, they're not complete boots, they used to wear ankle boots with tall leather leggings on top. Now these are original Carassiers leggings but they could be from after the First World War because they were they still use them to the present day for ceremonial use. And as with most other cavalry they always wore breeches, they have the red breeches with a blue stripe down the side to show that they were the cavalry. Then one of the main weapons is the sword, this is the Carassiers sword, it's quite a large heavy weapon, the blades are almost 39 inches long, it's quite a heavy piece of equipment. The Carassiers get their name from the metal breastplate that's called a cuirass. Underneath they have a waistcoat that's just to protect the uniform from getting rubbed by the metal. It comes in two halves, the front part is a lot thicker metal than the rear but even so it was completely out of date for the by the time the First World War started. This is the Carassiers sword, I got this from Wilson's 55 Military Auctions a few years ago, it was advertised as a replica but it's got stampings on the hilt there, there's rust and stains on the blade, there's actually writing on the blade, I don't know so whether it's original or not I don't know, there you go. The plume at the back of the helmet was made of horse hair, if you look down the middle and at the top there there's a plaited section, they quite often did that. Then there's the weapon they carried, it's a carbine. This is actually an artillery carbine, the Carassiers had their own special one, it didn't have any cheek piece on the buttstock and there's a leather piece on the end of the butt as well, that was to stop the rifle slipping off the breastplate when they're firing it. According to Ian McCollum from the YouTube channel ForgottenWeapons.com, there's only ever a few thousand Carassier carbines made and there are actually only around six left in existence, so to have an original one of those is pretty rare. Although this is just an ordinary artillery carbine, it is a bit unique and has a bit of a story with it, I'll tell you about that later. Another item the cavalry carried was the water canteen, this is slightly different than what the ordinary infantry would wear. Then we have the helmet, this is just for an ordinary trooper, it's not for an officer, it's very elaborate, I mean it hasn't changed much since the time of Napoleon and they wouldn't have looked out of place, the Battle of Waterloo, and when the war first started they did try and put cloth covers on to just hide the shiny metalwork, but it was about 1950 and all this kind of uniform was done away with, it was completely inappropriate. This is the Berthier carbine, it's the 1890 model, this one's actually dated 1892. It was loaded with a three round clip, and when the last round was fired the empty clip would fall out that hole at the bottom, and although this looks like a basic carbine it is quite unusual because in 1916 the French army recalled most of these and added an extra, they put a fixed magazine there that held five rounds and they put extra woodwork across there to protect the metalwork, so this is quite rare really because it's just as it would have been made in 1892. And another unusual thing about this, if you look there, there's some Arabic writing and luckily for me my stepson was at university a few years ago and he met and kept in touch with an Egyptian young lady called Lobna and she very kindly translated it for me, and it basically means this is the property of Sultan Ali Dinar Zakaria, and when you look him up he was the last sultan of Darfur which is now in Sudan, in 1916 he decided he was going to support the Ottoman Turks in the first world war, so the allies weren't very impressed with that, so they sent a combined force of British and Egyptian soldiers down to have a word with him, and during one of the battles that ensued the sultan was killed and he was the last, from then on there were no more sultans of Darfur, but today one of his palaces in Sudan has been turned into a museum, and I would think really I would like to send this back there if I could, you know and that's where it belongs, when it says it's his property it didn't mean that he actually owned this rifle, he had that inscription on all the weapons of all his soldiers, so it wasn't actually personally owned by him, but it's owned by his army, so but the trouble is that with the Sudan there's a bit of a civil war going on there at the moment, so I don't know whether that'll ever get that back there or not, but there you go.