The ‘Eastern war’, as the Crimean war was known in Russia, showed the backwardness of the Russian army, still equipped with smooth-bore muskets, compared with the French and British who had the new Minié rifle.
The British were masters of open-field fighting where massed lines of infantry faced one another while using the inaccurate smooth-bore muskets.
The V-3 long-range gun, code-named by the Germans Hochdruck pumpe (high-pressure pump) or Fleisigges Leichen, was a long-range smooth-bore gun, designed to fire fin-stabilized shells.
The ‘screw guns’ to which Kipling refers were rifled artillery pieces with longer range and more penetrating power than the older smooth-bore guns.