Selimoen Expedition (August 1879)

The Selimoen Expedition of 13 August 1879 – 15 August 1879 was the final Dutch military operation of the first phase of the Atjeh-oorlog, undertaken to pursue the departed enemy into his furthest hiding-places in the valley of Lamtobah and at Selimoen on the Atjeh-rivier, the last refuge of the insurgents. For the column of Luitenant-Kolonel Gerlach the tocht was the climax of a longer operation that had begun with the embarkation at Oleh-leh and the landing at Lampanas of 26–27 July 1879, had passed through the march into the mountains and a fortnight’s occupation of the Lamtoba valley, and was closed by the return over the mountains, the evacuation of the valley and the quarantine and repatriation of 23 August – 4 September 1879. With the submission of Toekoe Moeda Daoed and the flight of Panglima Polem and the Imam Longbatta to the upper lands of Pedir, the large-scale operations in Great Acheh came to an end; on 5 September 1879 the active columns were dissolved. In Van Heutsz’s 1893 tract De onderwerping van Atjeh, the tocht naar Selimoen is the schitterend besloten — brilliantly concluded — closing movement of the XXVI Moekims campaign: the operational act by which Generaal van der Heijden completed the conquest of the Sagi of the XXVI Moekims and thereby — together with the XXII Moekims campaign of 1878 — brought the entire valley of Groot-Atjeh under Dutch authority.

Background

After the campaign against the XXVI Moekims of 4 July [1879] a last expedition was deemed necessary to pursue the departed enemy into his furthest hiding-places and to drive him entirely out of the territory of Atjeh. Information had been received that some 1,000 persons from the XXII and XXVI Moekims were in the valley of Lamtobah, provided with firearms, ammunition and provisions. The enemy was to be brought to bay from two sides. A column was to be embarked for Lampanas on the north coast east of Kroëng Rajah and Batoe Poetih, and to advance thence to Lamtobah, after which a part was even to push through to Selimoen on the Atjeh-rivier, the last refuge of the insurgents. At the same time a column from Indrapuri over Gleiêng along the river was to approach the same place from the other side.

The Lamtobah Column

On 27 July [1879] the troops disembarked at Lampanas and reached Lamtobah on 29 July without much opposition. The Imam of Lamtobah offered his submission. On 1 August [1879] the hostile Kepaja Doewa was punished. This march appeared to have made an impression on the enemy.

The Negotiations at Indrapuri

On 30 July [1879] two Atjehers with a white flag presented themselves to the Dutch authority at Indrapuri, as envoys of a blind priest, Habib Machmoed by name, who with 25 followers waited outside the fortification and was the bearer of a letter from some chiefs, among whom Toekoe Moeda Daoed, who exercised authority at Selimoen and had hitherto been known as one of the Dutch army’s most stubborn enemies. In that letter they offered the governor and military commander their submission and declared that they would exhort their people to return from the mountains and the woods to the kampongs. By another letter, addressed to Toekoe Kadli, the latter’s mediation with the governor was invoked. “The great misfortune,” so the former wrote, “brought by the war upon the three sagis of the land, makes me decide to offer my submission.”

The Capture of Selimoen

The march to Selimoen, which had first been given up, was now, in order to hasten the somewhat protracted negotiations, undertaken after all. On 13 August [1879] the columns of Indrapuri and Lamtobah set out at the same time. The latter still had to fight at Kepaja Doewa and Lam Soemboeng, and reached Selimoen on 15 August [1879]. The other column had already arrived there the day before. It had met the most serious opposition at Lampisang, where Toekoe di Tiroe with his band had awaited it. Toekoe Moeda Daoed and other chiefs now submitted; those who, like Panglima Polem and the Imam Longbatta, refused to give up the fight, fled to the upper lands of Pedir. “The return march to Indrapuri resembled a triumphal procession. Everywhere the population showed a peaceful disposition; in all kampongs, even on the commanding hills, white flags were planted; the troops, accompanied by the chiefs who had come in submission, were awaited in the kampongs by men, women and children, and provided with refreshments; all enemy bentings were abandoned.”

The End of Large-Scale Operations

With the march to Selimoen, the operations in Great Acheh came to an end. On 5 September [1879] the active columns were dissolved. “To be sure, the principal among the hostile chiefs — Toewankoe Haschim, who still kept watch over the young pretender to the sultanship Toewankoe Daoed [destined for the sultan’s rank in 1874], Imam Longbatta, Panglima Polem, his son Radja Koelala and others — persisted in their hostile attitude, but their means were scattered and they had placed themselves beyond the reach of our troops, namely at Kemala, in the interior south of Pedir.”

Account from Cool & Hooijer (1889) — the march of the Gerlach column, 13–15 August 1879

The fullest eyewitness narrative of the Selimoen tocht is the account of the column of Gerlach printed in 1889 by W. Cool and G. B. Hooijer — the chief of the staff and the chief of the recording brigade of the Lamtoba column itself — in Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis, pp. 38–58.

The order of 11 August and the composition of the column

On 12 August at eleven o’clock the service-packets of the Militaire Bevelhebber had arrived at Lamtoba with the march order dated 11 August: the column was to march on the 13th to Selimoen, to force the population and chiefs of the XXII and XXVI Moekims fled thither to submission; deserted kampongs were to be burned; on submission five hostages were to be taken along and a waarborgsom, nearly corresponding to that fixed for Lamtoba, was to be delivered; an etappe-post for the vivres would be erected at Ajer-Alang on the Atjeh river, halfway between Indrapoeri and Selimoen; and the column was to seek contact, by two signal-rockets at seven o’clock in the evening, with the column of Majoor Lubeck marching up from Indrapoeri along the Atjeh river, which would answer the signal half an hour later. At six o’clock in the morning of 13 August the column-commandant marched out with his staff, five companies of infantry (the whole 6e Bataljon with staff and the 3rd Company of the 9e Bataljon Infanterie), a section of cannon and a section of mortars, the Mineurs detachment, an ambulance of thirty-five tandoes and a coolie-park of three hundred and fifty men carrying vivres for four days — the whole coolie strength of the column numbering 650, a figure considerably reduced, as the chief of the staff’s earlier calculation of 1,600 bearers shows, by the creation of the Ajer-Alang etappe and by the driving along of sappies (slaughter-cattle), which freed the carriers of salt meat. Two companies of the 9e Bataljon, the 2nd and the 4th, remained behind under Majoor Ducroo for the guard of the bivouac.

The fight at the ruined kampong of Kepaja Doewa, 13 August

The path of the punitive expedition of early August was followed; at twelve o’clock the ruined kampong was reached without sight of an enemy — then, at the height of the destroyed Kepaja Doewa, shots fell which, slowly increasing, wound the voorhoede into a fire-fight. The enemy had taken a very strong position: halfway up a rising hollow way which the column had to pass, an earthen trench with refuge-places more than a hundred paces long, covered in front by a heavy verhakking (abatis) and flanked near the footpath by a palissaded tamboer — a kind of blockhouse; the banked earth of the trench stood perpendicularly a metre to a metre and a half thick and was fitted with bamboo tubes to fire through. While the voorhoede’s infantry advanced against it and Majoor Coblijn set the Mineurs allotted to him at clearing the abatis, the artillery arrived at the marshy strip in the lowest fold of the ground and had to cross it under the fire of the strongly dominating height opposite — an improvised bridge was thrown together of wood found near by, the horses led over one by one, the ammunition carried across separately by the gunners. The main column, filing man behind man down the narrow path through the burned kampong, bunched up under the enemy’s fire. To prevent losses a swift and resolute action became necessary: Coblijn gave the order to storm. Through very marshy ground formed by the damming of a spring and through bamboo abatis laid by the enemy before his position, the 1st platoon of the 2nd Company of the 6e Bataljon — a native company, with its captain Clerkson at its head — turned the work on the flank, while the 2nd platoon, with which Coblijn had joined himself, held it in check in front. The enemy took flight headlong to a deep ravine; the soldiers sat so close upon his heels that one of them still gripped an Atjeher by the head as he let himself slide down the steep wall among the shrubs and ferns, but to his regret held only the man’s headscarf in his hands. The native sergeant Ramoudin was the first, the Luitenant-Adjudant Popelier the second in the fortification. By the great swiftness of the storm the column had only three wounded, among them the 2e Luitenant Van Erpen Royaards; nine hundred and seventy cartridges were fired; the defenders had numbered, by estimation, only some thirty men for a work laid out for many more.

Half a paal further on, a bivouac ground was taken at one o’clock on a gently sloping great alang-alang field some 1,700 feet above the sea; by three all had marched up. The bivouac had the carré form; because the ridge fought over that day still dominated the camp and offered no room for the whole column, the 3rd Company of the 9e Bataljon was lodged upon it — a measure that contributed much to the night’s rest, for in the evening Atjehers once more tried to climb the hill, apparently to fire the camp from it, and were quickly driven off by the alarmed company. At seven o’clock, as ordered, the two signal-rockets were let off from a plateau that gave a wide view over a part of the Atjeh valley; “a time of tension followed”, and precisely at the appointed hour three rockets showed the place where the Lubeck column was lodged — by calculation at Gli-teng. In the unknown, wild, hostile region contact was made; henceforward one went together to meet the future. At eleven o’clock that night a fairly heavy rain began, lasting till three in the morning — the only serious rain of a forty-days’ tocht passed under the open sky, a circumstance the eyewitnesses prize as one of the great mercies of the expedition.

The panorama of the Atjeh valley, 14 August

Before daybreak on 14 August, wet and stiffened by the cold mountain wind that descended along the steep slopes of the Goudberg, the column marched at six; and when the voorhoede came to the edge of the plateau from which the rockets had been let off, there appeared in the bright glittering light of the rising sun an overwhelming panorama: almost two thousand feet below, the valley of Groot-Atjeh rolled out — “the witness of so much strife and privation, so much greatness and misery” — the sea a silver stripe on the horizon to the right, and to the left, where the mountains drew together and the Atjeh river seemed to force its way with difficulty, the unknown land, the goal of the tocht, Selimoen. While the troops came up one after another and could not suppress a cry of admiration, the brigade-chief Hooijer drew a ground-plan of the terrain of the Atjeh valley as it presented itself from the plateau and took angles of the marked points — kampong corners, river-bends, mountain and hill tops — with his instrument, the work which, repeated at Selimoen and Indrapoeri and completed by the measurements during the marches of both columns, produced the Schetskaart van het boven-stroomgebied der Atjeh-rivier accompanying the book.

The geography then seen is described pp. 44–47: the valley-bottom, 3,000–4,000 metres wide, stretched from west to east; in its middle the Atjeh river received the Selimoen and Lamkabir rivers and ran in mighty bends, mirroring the morning light, through flat sawah-fields and a connected series of kampongs on both banks; eastward and upstream of Selimoen the floor gradually narrowed, but as far as the eye reached it lay covered with rice-fields set off and edged by small kampongs, and by the guides’ information the road to Kemala led through that valley; the mountain saddle dividing the Atjeh valley from the ground of Segli seemed of slight height. Southward the Atjeh river rushed through a deeply incised thickly overgrown ravine at the Mentelah mountain’s feet to the north-west towards Selimoen; near the left side-rivulet, the Kroeng Semilik, the ravine widened to a 1,500-metre-wide valley holding the narrow Aloe-er Gintang kampong strip, narrowed again at the little kampong Lip, and at Pantjar entered a wider sawah-ground, whence the river ran past kampong Kanalo to Selimoen. This narrow ravine of the Atjeh river was enclosed on the right by 450-metre-high chalk hills, here and there alang-alang-covered, pressing like a wedge between the Atjeh and Selimoen rivers; on the left by a 4,000-metre-wide, 200-metre-high hill mass; the Kroeng Lam Lo-öt separated it from the forested steep ridges of the Mentelah chain. Behind those confusingly winding ridges rose “stately and proud, over a length of 20 kilometres, the toothed crest of the 6,000-foot Glé Mentelah”; in the west the eye could pierce only along the narrow green defile of the Kroeng Djerir between the mountain of that name and the equally high Glé Raja, and was then stopped by the 7,500-foot, heavily timbered Glé Agam; over the bare spurs of the Glé Raja, which near Indrapoeri narrow the valley and give the natural boundary between its upper and lower course, the alluvial plains of Groot-Atjeh, the rocky bent ridge of the Glé Datar and the silver line of the sea were faintly seen. And on the yellow-greenish sawah in the depth a fine small black stripe was espied, first through the binoculars, creeping slowly on — a few little bits crumbled off, moving right and left; small white clouds came forth: “that was the column Lubeck, advancing as it fired.”

Lam-Lepong and Lepong-Bajoe, 14 August

The descent was made with the guns unyoked, let down sliding and held back by drag-ropes, the horses led zig-zag by hand; halfway the slope a plateau gave the chance of rest; the last part of the mountain was yet steeper; after the crossing of a rivulet the artillery could be spanned again, but soon a deep ravine, and then a second not less deep, had to be traversed. On the far side of it the beginning of a benting was found — the enemy had presumably left too early on the column’s approach, or had given up his plans at the approach of Lubeck’s column, which would have threatened him in the rear; the excellent choice of the point, commanding the narrow footpath rising from the ravine’s depth, had certainly saved the column heavy losses. Repeated firing on the march cost nevertheless one man, a dwangarbeider, wounded in the arm. At one o’clock the voorhoede debouched on an extensive sawah — and hardly had the point attained it when a fairly heavy fire was suddenly opened from the kampong Lam-Lepong and, above all, from behind a great quantity of heavy stones lying beside that kampong. The point at once took position, the voortroep joined, and, thus a company strong, Majoor Coblijn let it storm; the enemy fled headlong, the company entered the kampong and chastised it by the burning of the houses. The gros of the voorhoede meanwhile marched up, and the artillery came into battery against the kampong Lepong-Baijoe lying behind and beside Lam-Lepong, in which direction the enemy had been seen withdrawing: fourteen shells and mortar-bombs were fired, of which six — presumably because some ammunition-chests had got wet at the debarkation — did not burst; then the column-commandant ordered the advance over the rice-fields. Resistance was no longer offered; but as it was now half past two, the column, which had marched all day under a burning sun, was extremely tired, and the guides estimated the distance to Selimoen at still three hours, the plan of reaching that point the same day was given up. The bivouac was pitched in the conquered kampong, the Mineurs making shelters of its wood, first of all for the ambulance, and a free strip cut before the outposts, the felled trees and shrubs serving at once as abatis. In the kampong six casks of powder and two casks of cartridges were found, as well as some weapons; in the house of the Iman a letter, by its appearance from the Militaire Bevelhebber and affixed at an eye-catching place, together with the answer, and some packeted bound books which had apparently been meant to be carried off, were taken along the next day and later sent to the Governor. At seven o’clock in the evening signal-rockets were again let off outside the kampong, and were answered at half past seven, very near, in the direction where Selimoen had to lie. The day had cost again nearly a thousand cartridges; in the night shots woke the camp, briskly answered by the outposts.

15–17 August: the meeting at Selimoen

On the morning of 15 August the march was resumed at six o’clock; in view of the peaceable answer given to the Militaire Bevelhebber and the fact that from this kampong itself no fire had been opened on the column, the houses of Lepong-Baijoe were spared at the departure. The distance remaining proved but two and a half paal; only at the crossing of the Lamkabir river did the artillery have to unyoke. At about nine o’clock the column came into the neighbourhood of Selimoen: the population streamed out of the kampongs, white flags were stuck out everywhere — and from afar sounded the tones of the Wilhelmus van Nassauwen: Lubeck’s column was already in possession, having occupied Selimoen the day before. Near the kampong the column was awaited by Toekoe Moeda Daoed, who had voluntarily submitted to Majoor Lubeck on the 14th and had promised to go with him to Kota Radja — the meeting, his appearance (“not great of stature, without beard or moustache, light-yellow of complexion, with great dark eyes… awaiting the column-commandant with calm dignity”), and the bivouac taken at ten o’clock on the right bank of the Selimoen river are narrated in the article on the Submission of Toekoe Moeda Daoed. In the afternoon Toekoe Tjoet Hadjet — commonly called Toekoe Ajer Alang, a brother of Panglima Polim — came in to offer his submission; in the evening at about ten o’clock some shots were fired on Lubeck’s bivouac, eight hundred paces off behind the hills, and a section of infantry was posted on a dominating hill between the two camps.

On 16 August Kapitein Van Rijn marched to Ajer-Alang with one and a half company and about five hundred coolies to forage, the officier van gezondheid Nöckedved accompanying four wounded and thirteen seriously sick through to Indrapoeri — a march through a region which only days before had been accounted the centre of the resistance and which now stood planted with white flags. On the morning of 17 August Majoor Lubeck, after waiting a couple of hours for Toekoe Moeda Daoed — “a time of great tension”, for he had promised in his report to the General to bring this chief to the Kraton — marched back to Indrapoeri with Toekoe Moeda Daoed, Toekoe Ajer Alang and some retinue, leaving his remaining stock of vivres, more than half a day, at Gerlach’s disposal. From Toekoe Moeda Daoed’s information it appeared that his brother Massa-an, Panglima Polim, Toekoe Radja Koeala, the Iman Longbattah and other prominent hostile chiefs had still been assembled at Selimoen on the day before the columns’ arrival, had deliberated in the missigit, and had fled to Reng-Reng in the VII Moekims of Pedir, three day-marches away; Gerlach thought earnestly of marching thither on his own responsibility, but abandoned the design in view of the weariness of troops and carriers, the great number of sick, the possibly insufficient vivres and the prescribed return march over Lamtoba — the footnoted reflection recording that, had the return through the Atjeh valley been permitted, the advice would have been different, and that a reverse as at Batoe-Iliq near Samalangan could have undone the success of the latest victories.

The return over the mountains, 18–20 August

By order of the Militaire Bevelhebber the Gerlach column had to return along the same route over Lamtoba; the return march of 18–20 August led it past the revived kampongs of Lepong-Baijoe and the burned Lam-Lepong, under the fire of roaming bands, over the ravines in which the chief of the staff held full power to throw the loads of vivres away, and up the climb on which for every collapsed carrier two chain-gangers were needed, until on 20 August at two o’clock the column stood again in the bivouac at Lamtoba. Six days later the valley was evacuated; on 4 September 1879 the last division embarked at Lampanas.

Account from De onderwerping van Atjeh (Van Heutsz, 1893) — the schitterend besloten of the XXVI Moekims campaign

Van Heutsz, writing in 1893 as former Chef van den Staf in Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden and eyewitness to the 1879 campaign, frames the tocht naar Selimoen as the closing movement — the schitterend besloten — of the XXVI Moekims campaign. The campaign, opened in July 1879 as the second of the two Sagi campaigns of 1878–1879, was the operational sequel to the XXII Moekims campaign of July–October 1878 — the campaign that had culminated in the submission of Habib Abdoel Rachman and Tekoe Moeda Baid on 13 October 1878. The XXVI Moekims campaign applied the same strategic logic to the Sagi of the XXVI Moekims — the second of the three Sagi’s of Groot-Atjeh — and culminated in the Selimoen tocht. The day-order of 5 September 1879 — issued at Kota-Radja after the active columns had been dissolved — was the General’s formal declaration that the entire sequence, “schitterend besloten door den tocht naar Selimoen”, had brought “geheel Groot-Atjeh ten onder gebragt” — the whole of Greater Atjeh subdued:

“Dagorder. Officieren, Ambtenaren, Onderofficieren en Soldaten! Met den veldtocht tegen de XXVI Moekims, schitterend besloten door den tocht naar Selimoen; is geheel Groot-Atjeh ten onder gebragt”.

The Selimoen tocht thus functioned, in Van Heutsz’s narrative, as the operational act by which the XXVI Moekims campaign was closed — and the schitterend besloten formula the General used in the day-order was, in Van Heutsz’s reading, the rhetorical acknowledgement that the tocht was the schitterend — brilliant — closing movement the campaign had been building toward.

The columns from Lamtoba and Indrapoeri

The Selimoen tocht was carried out by two columns converging on Selimoen from different directions: a column from Lamtobah and a column from Indrapuri. The operational plan — described by Van Heutsz in his reproduction of the verslag of the Commandant of the Indian army’s September 1879 inspection — was the closing movement of a broader operational sequence that had included the overmeestering of Indrapoeri, the zuivering of the right river-bank, the aantasten of Gleim, and the binnendringen of the XXVI Moekims from various sides:

“Aan het stoute, met beleid ontworpen operatieplan volgens hetwelk Indrapoeri werd overmeesterd, de rechter rivieroever gezuiverd, Gleim aangetast, de XXVI Moekims van verschillende zijden binnengedrongen en Selimoen door colonnes uit Lamtoba en Indrapoeri bezocht werd, hebben wij het groote succes te danken”.

The plan was, in the verslag’s author’s reading, the stoute, met beleid ontworpen operatieplan — the bold, well-designed operational plan — to which the colony owed the groote succes. The two columns — from Lamtoba and Indrapoeri — were the closing pincers of the plan: their convergence on Selimoen was the operational act by which the conquest of the XXVI Moekims was completed. The choice of Indrapoeri as the base of one of the columns — the village that would later, in 1883–1884, become the site of the war party’s installation of Toeankoe Mohamad Daoed as sultan in the emesdjid Indrapoeri — was, in Van Heutsz’s narrative, the operational frame within which the later political-symbolic contest over the great mosque would unfold.

The high-water mark of the Dutch conquest

The Selimoen tocht marked, in Van Heutsz’s reading, the high-water mark of the Dutch position in Groot-Atjeh. With the tocht’s completion and the day-order of 5 September 1879 that declared “geheel Groot-Atjeh ten onder gebragt”, the General was “de door den vijand gevreesde overwinnaar van het aloude machtige Atjehsche rijk” — the feared-by-the-enemy conqueror of the ancient mighty Atjehnese kingdom — and the Dutch administration sat “volgens de Atjehsche begrippen, door het recht van verovering, op den troon van den Sultan” — according to the Atjehnese conceptions, by the right of conquest, on the throne of the Sultan. The Selimoen tocht thus functioned, in Van Heutsz’s narrative, as the operational act that completed the conquest sequence begun with the XXII Moekims campaign of July 1878 — the act that, in Van Heutsz’s editorial emphasis, established the General as the winnaar van Groot-Atjeh whose krachtige individualiteit would, but for his “onverantwoordelijke” dismissal in early 1881, have brought the entire Atjeh-oorlog to a close within “nog geen 14 maanden na het begin van zijne zegerijke veldtochten” — barely fourteen months after the beginning of his victorious campaigns.

Significance

The Selimoen Expedition of 13 August–15 August 1879 is the final Dutch military operation of the first phase of the Atjeh-oorlog. In Van Heutsz’s 1893 narrative, it is the schitterend besloten — brilliantly concluded — closing movement of the XXVI Moekims campaign and the operational act by which the conquest of the second Sagi of Groot-Atjeh was completed. Its significance in the Aceh Wiki History record lies in four things. First, it was the closing movement of the XXVI Moekims campaign — the schitterend besloten formula the General used in the day-order of 5 September 1879 to declare “geheel Groot-Atjeh ten onder gebragt” — and the operational act by which the entire conquest sequence, begun with the XXII Moekims campaign of July 1878, was completed. Second, it was carried out by two converging columns — from Lamtobah and Indrapuri — that closed the pincers on Selimoen in the final movement of the stoute, met beleid ontworpen operatieplan the Commandant of the Indian army’s September 1879 inspection report described. Third, it was the operational frame within which the war party’s 1883–1884 installation of Toeankoe Mohamad Daoed as sultan in the emesdjid Indrapoeri would later unfold — the choice of Indrapoeri as the base of one of the tocht’s columns established the village’s operational significance that the war party would later exploit for political-symbolic purposes. Fourth, it was the operational act that marked the high-water mark of the Dutch position in Groot-Atjeh — the moment at which, in Van Heutsz’s reading, the General was “de door den vijand gevreesde overwinnaar van het aloude machtige Atjehsche rijk” and the Dutch administration sat “volgens de Atjehsche begrippen, door het recht van verovering, op den troon van den Sultan” — and the act against which the 1884 Concentratie withdrawal to the geconcentreerde stelling of Groot-Atjeh would, in Van Heutsz’s narrative, be judged as the colony’s great act of self-betrayal.

To the general narratives the eyewitness account of Cool and Hooijer adds a fifth dimension. It is the only full printed narrative of the expedition written by participants — the chief of the staff and the chief of the recording brigade of the Lamtoba column — and it preserves what the official summaries efface: the storm on the tamboer of Kepaja Doewa and the three wounded of 13 August; the wet night at 1,700 feet and the rocket-signals answered from Gli-teng; the panorama in which Lubeck’s advancing column was a black stripe creeping across the sawah two thousand feet below; the spared houses of Lepong-Baijoe against the burned ones of Lam-Lepong; and the price of the order that sent the victors back over the mountains instead of down the conquered valley. In the book’s own reading, the schoone bladzijde is not the conquest alone but the conduct of the conquerors — the quarter given at Selimoen, the sick of the enemy tended, the hostages taken where money could not be paid — and the defensive triangle the tocht tested and closed, within which, after more than a year of “complete tranquillity”, the first stone of the great missigit of Indrapoeri would be laid amid a chandoerie-feast of six thousand Atjehers.

Sources

De geschiedenis van Nederland in onzen tijd, by J. A. de Bruyne, Directeur der Hoogere Burgerschool te Zierikzee. Deel IV. 1872-1883. Nieuwe uitgave. Schiedam: J. F. Dupont, 1912, Hoofdstuk I, pp. 107-108.

De onderwerping van Atjeh, door J. B. van Heutsz, Majoor der Infanterie, gewezen Chef van den Staf in Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden. ‘s-Gravenhage: De Gebroeders van Cleef; Batavia: G. Kolff en Co., 1893, esp. pp. 18, 22. OCR-filename: 20260718_105749_DLP-107-De_onderwerping_van_Atjeh_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.

Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis, door W. Cool en G. B. Hooijer (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1889), pp. 34-58. OCR-filename: 20260720_115822_DLP-135-Eene_schoone_bladzijde_uit_Atjeh_s_geschiedenis_Nemotron_OCR_v2_OCR.txt.

Acknowledgement of sources. This article is a single consolidated account combining the material previously held in this entry (De Bruyne, 1912; Van Heutsz, 1893) with the eyewitness narrative given by W. Cool and G. B. Hooijer in Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis (1889). Dutch terminology has been rendered in English, the original Dutch being retained only in direct quotations and in bibliographic citations.

description	The final Dutch military operation of the first phase of the Atjeh-oorlog, undertaken 13-15 August 1879 to pursue the departed enemy into his furthest hiding-places in the valley of Lamtobah and at Selimoen on the Atjeh-rivier; the closing movement of the XXVI Moekims campaign, declared complete by Van der Heijden's day-order of 5 September 1879.
tags	event, war, military, dutch-colonial, aceh-war, atjeh, 19th-century, 1879, campaign, dutch, colonial
aliases	Tocht naar Selimoen, Selimoen Campaign, Expedition to Selimoen, the Selimoen expedition, Selimoen tocht (1879), Selimoen campaign, the September 1879 Selimoen expedition, the Lamtoba-Selimoen expedition, Lamtoba-Selimoen tocht, Tocht van Lampanas naar Selimoen

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