Highland Regiments footwear during the Great War

[Jacques]

Here's another photo showing a mish-mash of different jacket styles. The two men in front have the proper style with the bottom cutaway. But in the 2nd row I see at least two men with the straight-cut jacket style. Since they dispensed with wearing sporrans at this point, I suppose it really didn't matter which style of jacket they were wearing.



As for footwear, I've seen a lot of reenactors wearing brown rough-out boots for WWI trench reenactments. Most WWI field photos are showing dirty/muddy boots, so it's impossible to tell what they were supposed to look like. Illustrations from the era seem to show both brown boots and black boots with varying lengths of puttees (the photo above shows long puttees). I think it varied greatly between regiments, as well as resupply during different points of the war. They were probably more interested in just keeping boots on their soldiers' feet rather than caring whether they all had the same thing. If I were reenacting a period uniform, though, I'd probably go with black boots and short puttees like this:

Some more great examples and information. And i'm back on the fence again. Thanks Tobus. But as close as i can interpret from all the photos i've had access to, your comments bear merit. The darker (black?) seem to be the more prevalent colour. It's just so hard to tell from the all too often grainy black and white photos. But the black shoe polish/wax that was used may have provided some water proofing (possibly meaning more frequent use), not every soldier might have had two pairs of boots (black for parade and unpolished for work parties and combat), and the highland regiments did switch from from the longer putties to the short ones during the war. That is, if the information i discovered online is correct.
Then again, maybe the soldiers in the trenches were more concerned about clean weapons, ammunition, clean water, rations and could have cared less about the condition of their boots. Seems like there are so many possible answers for such a simple question.

*Note to Tobus: i owe you an apology Tobus, can't believe i got your name wrong on my first draft.