De tocht van Overste van Daalen door de Gajo-, Alas- en Bataklanden (Geusau, 1939)

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tagsdocument, article, colonial, military, atjeh, gajo, alas, batak, van-daalen, 1904, 1939, indisch-militair-tijdschrift
aliasesGeusau 1939, Alting van Geusau van Daalen, De tocht van Overste van Daalen door de Gajo- Alas- en Bataklanden, J. Alting van Geusau 1939, Geusau van Daalen tocht 1904, Van Daalen campaign Geusau account

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De tocht van Overste van Daalen door de Gajo-, Alas- en Bataklanden (8 Febr.–23 Juli 1904) — “The march of Colonel van Daalen through the Gayo, Alas, and Batak lands (8 February–23 July 1904)” — is an article by J. Alting van Geusau, published in 1939 in Indisch Militair Tijdschrift (Netherlands Indies Military Journal), No. 30, p. 593 e.v., with illustrations, recording the campaign of Colonel (Overste) van Daalen through the Gayo, Alas, and Batak lands of the central Sumatran interior between 8 February and 23 July 1904. The article is recorded as No. 566 in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940), in the Sumatra chapter.

Subject

The article’s subject, as recorded by Van Meurs, is the tocht — the march, the campaign — of Overste (Colonel) van Daalen through the Gajo-, Alas-, and Bataklanden in the year 1904. The dates given — 8 February to 23 July 1904 — fix the campaign’s duration at approximately five and a half months. The campaign — the Colonne van Daalen of the corpus’s existing entry — was the military zegetocht (victorious campaign) by which the Gayo and Alas highlands of central Sumatra were brought under Dutch control, completing the pacification of the interior of the Gouvernement Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden. The campaign is treated at length elsewhere in the corpus, from the perspectives of De Buitenbezittingen (1917) and of Dispereert Niet (1946); Geusau’s 1939 article is an independent retrospective account published in the principal military journal of the Netherlands Indies.

The inclusion of the Bataklanden in the article’s title — alongside the Gajo and Alas lands — extends the scope of the account beyond the Gayo-Alas campaign proper, which in the corpus’s existing entry is treated as a Gajo-Alas expedition. The Bataklands lie to the south and east of the Gayo-Alas highlands, and van Daalen’s column, in its traverse of the interior, passed through or near Batak territory on its way toward Tarotoeng in Tapanoeli, which the column reached on 18 June 1904 according to the Dispereert Niet account. The Geusau article thus appears to treat the full traverse of the column from its starting point in Groot-Atjeh through the Gajo and Alas lands and into the Batak country of Tapanoeli.

Author and venue

Geusau — full name J. Alting van Geusau — published the article in Indisch Militair Tijdschrift (Netherlands Indies Military Journal), No. 30, p. 593 e.v., with illustrations (Met ills.). The Indisch Militair Tijdschrift was the principal professional military journal of the Netherlands Indies, and the choice of venue signals the article’s intended audience: serving and former officers of the Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger with an interest in the campaigns of the preceding generation. The article’s appearance in 1939 — thirty-five years after the campaign — places it in the late-colonial retrospective phase, when the Atjeh-oorlog was passing from living memory into institutional history.

Place in the 1939 Literatuur-Overzicht

The article is No. 566 in the Sumatra chapter (Hoofdstuk III, Nos. 548–658) of Van Meurs’s survey, where it stands as the sole G-letter entry of the Sumatra chapter. It is immediately followed by No. 568 — the separate account of the same campaign by De tocht van Overste van Daalen door de Gajo-, Alas- en Bataklanden 1904 (Harders, 1939), published in the Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging in 1939. The double recording of the campaign — by Geusau in the Indisch Militair Tijdschrift and by Harders in the officers’ association journal — marks 1939 as a year in which the van Daalen campaign of 1904 was the subject of retrospective military-historical writing in two distinct professional venues.

Significance

For AcehWiki, the article is significant as a 1939 retrospective on the van Daalen campaign of 1904, published in the principal military journal of the Netherlands Indies, and as an independent source for the campaign that complements the corpus’s existing accounts — the colonne-van-daalen-1904 entry (drawing on De Buitenbezittingen and Dispereert Niet) and the van Daalen biographical entry. The article’s inclusion of the Bataklanden in the title extends the scope of the campaign account, and the precise dates (8 February–23 July 1904) furnish an independent confirmation of the campaign’s duration. The article also complements the Harders account (No. 568) of the same campaign.

See Also

Source

Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 566. Citing: J. Alting van Geusau, “De tocht van Overste van Daalen door de Gajo-, Alas- en Bataklanden. Met ills. (8 Febr.–23 Juli 1904),” Indisch Militair Tijdschrift, No. 30 (1939), p. 593 e.v.

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