The uitreiking van het vaandel aan het Korps Maréchaussée — the presentation of a colour to the Korps Maréchaussée te voet in Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden — was the ceremony held on 2 April 1930 at Koeta Radja to mark the fortieth anniversary of the corps, and the occasion for which Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië issued the special number Het Korps Maréchaussée in Atjeh.
The royal grant
It had pleased Queen Wilhelmina to confer upon the corps the right to carry a colour. The koninklijk besluit (royal decree) gave as its ground that “het Korps Maréchaussée van Atjeh sedert de oprichting een belangrijke rol heeft vervuld bij de vertegenwoordiging en handhaving van het Nederlandsch Gezag” — the Corps Maréchaussée of Atjeh had, since its foundation, fulfilled an important part in the representation and maintenance of Netherlands authority. The jubilee editorial treated the grant as the formal fixing of the corps’s indispensable existence, forty years after a body first raised for police duty within the geconcentreerde stelling and originally intended to hand its task over to the civil administration.
Because the Maréchaussée had in 1914 been made a part of the arm of the Infantry, the editorial noted, its banner would correspond to that of “de Koningin van het Slagveld” — the Queen of the Battlefield, as the infantry was styled.
The setting: the cemetery at Peutjoet
The ceremony was to take place before the Kerkhof te Peutjoet, the military cemetery near Koeta Radja where many of the corps’s dead lay and where their names were chiselled into the wall. The editorial called the cemetery “een epos” — an epic — whose grand action was the establishment and confirmation of Netherlands authority, “een stuk gewijde grond, hetwelk niet dan met ontroering kan worden betreden” — a piece of consecrated ground that could not be entered but with emotion. There, it said, lay written the history of the Atjeh war, the story of a long struggle in which the Maréchaussée had taken the most honourable place. Busts of Scheepens, Darlang, Vis and Webb adorned the cemetery as so many symbols of moed, beleid en trouw — courage, conduct and fidelity, the words engraved on the knight’s cross of the Militaire Willems-Orde.
The anticipated ceremony
Colonel L. A. Snell, interviewed shortly before the event, described how he already saw the ceremony playing out in his imagination. When His Excellency the Legercommandant (army commander) should have handed over “het ons zoo dierbare Oranje-dundoek” — the orange bunting so dear to us — as the emblem of solidarity and attachment to fatherland and royal house, and when the last notes of the Wilhelmus had died away, then hundreds would spontaneously cry out “Leve de Koningin!” — long live the Queen — and many an old campaigner would brush away a tear.
Snell called the grant the fulfilment of a long-cherished wish: “wij, Maréchaussées, die onze Koningin met hart en ziel aanhangen, zijn er Hare Majesteit hoogst dankbaar voor” — we Maréchaussées, who cling to our Queen with heart and soul, are most grateful to Her Majesty for it. He counted it a privilege to be present, and travelled to Atjeh for the sixth time in his life to attend — “gelukkig niet om de gepantserde vuist te hanteeren” (happily, not to wield the mailed fist), but only to take part in the tribute to the corps with which he had so long shared good and ill.
The deputation and the voyage
A deputation travelled from Java to be present at the ceremony. The interviewer of the jubilee number was himself a member of it. During the interview Snell was telephoned by an old comrade who was to make the journey to Koeta Radja with him, and was heard to say: “Zorg er voor, dat er aan boord van de Tasman een voldoende voorraad ijskoud bier aanwezig is, want een goed Maréchaussée heeft een gezonden dorst!” — see to it that there is a sufficient supply of ice-cold beer on board the Tasman, for a good Maréchaussée has a healthy thirst.
The corps song
After the ceremony, the editorial anticipated, the old war song Manisé would be struck up throughout Atjeh, in the remotest corners where Maréchaussée were quartered, and everywhere else where old maréchaussées were living out their last days — including in the Netherlands.
Mosselman’s dissent
The memoirist W. J. Mosselman, writing in the same issue, welcomed the colour but set beside it a bitter reflection on the corps’s forgotten indigenous veterans. The corps as such, he wrote, stood innocent of their misery: that was a question for the community, represented in the government — “een kwestie van dankbaarheid, van waardeering en, zooals ik ook wel heb hooren zeggen, een kwestie van Eereschuld” — a question of gratitude, of appreciation and, as he had heard it said, a question of debt of honour. He nevertheless rejoiced with the men still serving, because the gift of the colour meant “tenminste een ideëele erkenning, een ideëele belooning” — at least an ideal recognition, an ideal reward — of what they had wrought.
See Also
- Korps Maréchaussée te voet in Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden
- Het Korps Maréchaussée in Atjeh (Jubileum-nummer 1930)
- Kerkhof Peutjoet
- L. A. Snell
- W. J. Mosselman
- Marechausseelied
- Tasman (ship)
- 2 April
- 1930
Source
Het Korps Maréchaussée in Atjeh: De Atjehsche Garde, 1890 - 2 April 1930, Extra Jubileum-nummer of Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië issued for the fortieth anniversary of the corps (1930), pp. 1-16. Offprint DLP-143, Bibliotheek KITLV, accession 621 116 794.