The night attack on Lampagar (2–3 May 1876) was one of the saddest events in the history of the Aceh War: a well-prepared surprise assault, an hour before dawn, on the open, barely defended Dutch camp at Lampagar in the VI Moekims, in which the post commander Captain Hoynck van Papendrecht and First Lieutenant Van de Roemer were killed inside their own camp, together with 5 native fusiliers, 1 forced-labourer and 1 native woman, while the attackers lost only 11 dead. The enemy slipped out again by the same northern and eastern sides by which he had come — and took his revenge on Dutch self-confidence. The event was described in full, from the official reports, by H. F. Meijer in Atjeh van 26 December 1875 tot 4 September 1876 (1883).
The open camp
The post of Lampagar had been established in January 1876 in the western VI Moekims, near the pass of Blang Kala, at the request of the population of the kampong itself, which had submitted when General Pel’s troops appeared. Because everything at Lampagar seemed friendly — the kampong heads came daily to pay their respects and the people offered food for sale — neither the post commander, Captain of Infantry Hoynck van Papendrecht, nor his successors felt the urgent need of a palisade. By the end of March the garrison was still quartered in an open campement: a square of 40 by 35 metres, enclosed only by a living fence (pagar) of growing wood, with abatis before it, adjoining the kampong Lamtjoet on the north and leaning on the sawah on the other sides. The buildings inside stood in disorder; some were Atjehnese huts of the kampong itself that had been left in place.
The warnings and the visit of the kampong heads
On 1 May Lieutenant Van de Roemer, back from escorting a transport to Olehleh, told the Captain that an Atjeher at Olehleh had heard of a band of about sixty enemies near the pass of Blang Kala intending to build a fortification. The Captain sent Van de Roemer with 30 men to reconnoitre towards the pass on the morning of 2 May; the patrol returned at half past ten — no enemy seen.
That evening the two kampong heads regarded as friends, Hadji Soliman, head of Lampagar, and Toekoe Amat, paid one of their usual visits to the camp and talked with Van de Roemer and the second officer, First Lieutenant Schnelle. They said they suspected that the enemy — among them, they hinted, Hadji Aboe, whose house the Dutch had burned in April for his part in the Pantjoer-patrol ambush — had evil designs on the VI Moekims; and they asked that the Dutch sentries on the north side should not fire too quickly if alarmed, because their own people would make population-patrols near the camp that very night as a proof of their loyalty. Some fifteen unarmed Atjehers — hunters licensed to shoot deer near Lampagar — appeared during the conversation; one of them even offered Van de Roemer a piece of venison.
Captain Hoynck van Papendrecht attached no importance to the visit; he had often declared how little he trusted any Atjehnese, yet now he judged no special precautions necessary — indeed, the request of the two heads was granted, and the sentries on the north side were warned not to fire too soon. The lieutenants Schnelle and Van de Roemer were uneasy all the same; Schnelle, awake until about two, heard dogs barking incessantly in the surrounding kampongs.
The attack
At about four in the morning rifle shots and a terrible yells woke him: the enemy, using the dark night, had sprung over the northern fence at two places and had divided into three parties — one made for the officers’ quarters from the north and west, another fell with klewang and lance into the barracks of the native soldiers, and a third seized the rifle racks of the garrison. The attack, Meijer wrote, was excellently prepared and bore witness to precise local knowledge. The garrison was cut into three; the enemy occupied the whole inner square between the officers’ quarters and the barracks, cut off the eastern side from the western, and isolated the European soldiers’ quarters completely.
Schnelle, sabre and revolver in hand, ran into two klewang-armed Atjehers; his revolver misfired but he parried a cut with his sabre, wounded one of them and drove them off, then collected the men on the south side — at first barely 12, Europeans soon reinforcing them — and had them fire volleys into the spaces before and behind the officers’ quarters so that the Atjehers assembled there had to give way. Of the other two officers nothing could be seen; calls by name went unanswered. With four soldiers he then moved along the front gallery of the officers’ quarters; five Atjehers ambushed there sprang out with raised klewangs, two were shot down, and the position was then held against another charging group — again two Atjehers fell, with no loss on the Dutch side.
During the whole fight, some of the European soldiers, whose quarters were entirely surrounded, had had no time to reach the alarm post; standing on the sleeping-tables they fired through the woven kadjang palm-mat walls of their rooms at the enemy outside, who shot low and thrust lances through the walls. The sailors’ wives and children — some thirty souls — were trapped in the native soldiers’ barracks, so that the soldiers on the west side could not fire inward at all and escaped one by one. Part of the attackers smashed the lamp in the officers’ gallery, by which Captain Hoynck had been working at his company administration since one o’clock; the burning petroleum spread over his papers, but on the clay floor it luckily caused no fire — darkness enveloped everything.
Sergeant Bekker was sent with a few men round the east side of the officers’ quarters to check a fire glowing at the camp’s north side; he lost one wounded man, killed an Atjeher, and found the fire dying out. Fifteen paces from the water, the artillery sergeant Trijns, severely wounded, had remained at his gun through the night; the European fusilier Kooij, who had shielded his way, and fusilier Bijleveldt — a klewang cut on his head and his forefinger cut off — forced their way through the enemy to the alarm post.
Dawn
Then the eastern sky paled, and Schnelle’s men saw what the night had cost. Outside the officers’ gallery lay the body of First Lieutenant Van de Roemer, a klewang cut across his head — killed on his way to his post. In his room, mutilated beyond recognition, lay Captain Hoynck van Papendrecht, struck down — as the artillery sergeant Trijns had seen — when he rose from his writing-table to take his weapons from the sleeping room. Between the quarters and the west barracks, and inside them, lay a mixed company of dead and severely wounded: women, soldiers and Atjehers together. Inside and outside the camp the enemy had left rifles and blunderbusses: 24 firearms altogether, besides quantities of klewangs and lances.
The count of the dead was: on the Dutch side, 2 officers, 5 native fusiliers, 1 forced-labourer and 1 native woman killed; 2 European non-commissioned officers, 1 native non-commissioned officer, 2 European and 10 native fusiliers, 1 forced-labourer and 5 native women wounded. The enemy left 11 dead; his wounded were carried off.
Who had done it?
At first light Hadji Soliman appeared with some followers and asked admission. Lieutenant Schnelle, now in command, admitted only him and demanded to know the origin of the fallen Atjehers. Although soldiers recognised in one dead man a daily fruit-seller of the pasar and in another one of the licensed deer-hunters of the day before, the cunning Hadji asserted roundly that none of the fallen belonged to his kampong.
The acting commander sent instantly for help: 40 men and a medical officer from Olehleh; a telegram to Kota Radja. The same day orders came: a company of barisan and a detachment of the right half of the 12th battalion were sent by rail (per spoor) to Olehleh and marched on to Lampagar; Major Boom, the military commandant at Olehleh, and the controleur Michielsen joined them with instructions for a strict investigation and the arrest of guilty kampong heads; the camp was to be turned into a proper storm-proof work, the population itself being forced to help in the fortification labour.
Five neighbourhood heads were summoned; all came, Hadji Soliman among them. Controleur Michielsen’s first conviction was that they had known the enemy’s plan, if not actively shared in it; they were taken into custody and the kampong Lamtjoet — whence the attack had come — was burned as punishment, as was the kampong Lambaroe. The same day the coconut trees of Lamtjoet were felled for the palisade of the new work; the population of Lampagar itself was forced to share in the fortification labour. But the interrogation of a wounded Atjeher captured on 4 May gave the story a different turn: the night attack, he declared, had been plotted a month earlier by Panglima Moeda of Piëng of Rēdeb in the XXII Moekims, who had led it in person and had been in the IV Moekims for a month. In connection with that statement, Michielsen came to the opposite conviction — that the heads and people of Lampagar were not so guilty after all and had even sufficiently warned the officers, who had either held the enemy too cheap or not taken the warning seriously. The arrested heads were released with the warning that their flight would be followed by the burning of their houses.
The fortified post
On 17 May 1876 the fortification of Lampagar was finished, laid out on the same principles as the other Dutch works; garrison strength was brought first to 70 and later to 100 men. Lampagar, however, remained surrounded by enemies, as was shown by the raid on kampong Lamtengah in the night of 6–7 May — in which fleeing friendly villagers, rowing to Olehleh in small prahus, were fired upon by mistake by the Dutch sentries there, three of them being wounded — and by the firing of a kampong southwest of Djempit on the evening of the same day.
Assessment
Meijer wrote that the disaster was the garrison’s own fault: this history, he said, had the right to that confession. Established in January, the post had by May received almost nothing to make it storm-proof; too much trust had been placed in heads and people; and the events of 7 April in the kampong Lambaroe had been warning enough. Nor was the blow limited to the Dutch: the trust of the friendly population of the VI Moekims in Dutch protection had been shaken — an account of which the raid on Lamtengah on the night of 6–7 May was the speaking proof.
See Also
- Lampagar
- Schnelle
- Van de Roemer
- Hoynck van Papendrecht
- Panglima Moeda of Piëng
- Hadji Soliman of Lampagar
- Koewala Pantjoer patrol ambush (7 April 1876)
- Guerilla warfare in Groot-Atjeh
- Atjeh van 26 December 1875 tot 4 September 1876
Source
Atjeh van 26 December 1875 tot 4 September 1876, door H. F. Meijer (Breda: P. B. Nieuwenhuijs, 1883), chapter VII, pp. 166–179; sketch no. 3 (the kampement at Lampagar in the night of 2–3 May 1876).