The Vereniging Het Roode Kruis in Atjeh (Dutch Red Cross Society, active in Atjeh) was the colonial auxiliary that, together with the Java public, sent comforts — tobacco, cigars, fruit, refreshing drinks, reading matter, playing cards, pipes, household articles and soap — to the troops of the bezettingskorps during the crisis of May–June 1874 and the cholera catastrophe of February 1875. Borel mentions the society in passing as one of the few alleviations of the wretched condition of the troops; the society’s despatches stand in implicit contrast to the official failures of supply, medical provision and transport that his book indicts.
The Comforts Sent to Atjeh
The Vereniging Het Roode Kruis, together with the Java public, sent to the troops in Atjeh an assortment of comforts that Borel enumerates: tobacco, cigars, fruit, refreshing drinks, reading matter, playing cards, pipes, household articles and soap. These were the small luxuries — the bevorading that supplemented the official rations of rijst, hard brood and slachtvee — that distinguished the soldiers’ lot from the barest subsistence and that, in the crisis months of mid-1874, made bearable a ration reduced to the “reglementaire ration” — often only rijst (boeboer). The hard brood supply ran out fourteen days after the departure of the hoofdmacht on 26 April 1874. The slachtvee was exhausted; over 100 stuks were lost. The kazerneloodsen had no zijwanden; rain poured through. “Nimmer klonk een blij gezang binnen de wallen van K. Radja,” Borel writes, and the Red Cross comforts — a packet of tobacco, a handful of cigars, a book or a pipe — were among the few alleviations.
The Medical Context
The Vereniging Het Roode Kruis’s work in Atjeh must be read against the catastrophic medical background of the occupation. By the end of May 1874 the Dutch macht had “ten gevolge van het overgroot aantal zieken bijna niets meer beteekende”; some companies could field fewer than 30 men of an original 125. Only the gravest sick could be taken into the ambulances; evacuation to Padang or Java was repeatedly thwarted by heavy surf. Mortality was extraordinary; among the kettinggang convict labourers catastrophic. The cholera catastrophe of February 1875 killed almost 500 people in the K. Radja ambulances alone — 270 of them military — averaging 15–18 per day, with peak days of 25 or even 30. The officieren van gezondheid — the medical officers — each had to treat more than 100 patients; Borel warmly praises their skill, zeal and self-sacrifice. The Kraton now resembled “one great hospital”; the dead were constantly carried through the interior, simply wrapped in a sheet, on wheeled stretchers drawn by two kettinggang convicts, to the cemetery at K. Podjoet — a practice Borel strongly criticises as injurious to morale. The decision was eventually taken to move the ambulances to the grasvlakte of Pantej Perak south of Penajoeng, where engineers urgently began building a camp for a battalion of infantry to cover the new hospitals.
The Limits of Charity
The Vereniging Het Roode Kruis’s comforts, however welcome, were — in Borel’s implicit judgement — no substitute for the strategic and logistical reforms the war required. The same Indische regeering that permitted the Red Cross to despatch tobacco and soap had failed to provide a zeehoofd at Oeleh Leh, had allowed the Indische Stoomboot-maatschappij to collect ƒ 1,200 per day in demurrage on the Baron Sloet van de Beele alone, had permitted the overcrowding of transports that bred cholera on the outward voyage, and had failed to supply steel achterlaadkanonnen to replace the obsolete voorlaadkanonnen whose tijdbuizen failed on wet terrain. The comforts of the Red Cross were thus, in Borel’s broader argument, one of the small acts of humanity that threw into relief the inhumanity of the system that made them necessary. The society’s work is mentioned alongside the praise of the medical officers and of overste de Jongh, the chief of the administrative service who improved the wretched feeding and care of the troops — the few figures in Borel’s account who emerge with credit from the long attrition of the bezettingskorps.
See Also
- Indische Leger
- Bezettingskorps in Atjeh
- Crisis at Kota Radja (May–June 1874)
- Cholera catastrophe at Kota Radja (February 1875)
- Pantej Perak
- Kettinggangers in Atjeh
- Kolonel de Jongh
- Generaal Pel
- 1874
- 1875
Source
Onze vestiging in Atjeh, critisch beschreven, by G. F. W. Borel, Kapitein der Artillerie. ‘s-Gravenhage: D. A. Thieme, 1878. pp. 122–130, 144–148, 167, 254–261.