A. B. C. Dom was a captain of artillery of the Netherlands East Indies Army who served in 1879 as batterij-commandant of the artillery of the Lamtoba column — a section of guns of the 18e Compagnie bergbatterij (mountain battery) of thirty-six men and twenty-one horses, with a second officer, together with two sections of mortars under an adjudant-onderofficier of twenty-three men — during the expedition to Lampanas, Lamtoba and Selimoen narrated in W. Cool and G. B. Hooijer’s Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis (1889). He was one of the six mounted officers of the expedition.
The mountain marches
Under Dom the artillery’s march formed the severest mechanical labour of the expedition. From Lampanas the guns — drawn, where the mountain track allowed, by their horses, and where the track failed, taken apart and carried piece by piece between and over the boulders of the dried mountain streams — crossed the Kroeng Plantoeng and twice the Kroeng Plinten before the valley of Lamtoba was reached. During the punitive expedition against Kepaja Doewa the guns had to be unharnessed and dragged up the sawah terraces, taken apart three times for the crossing of steep-walled ravines, and once hauled up a hill of more than eighteen degrees’ slope and several hundred metres’ length; before the kampong they came into battery against the principal commanding hill and drove the enemy from it with eight well-placed granaatkartetsen (shrapnel shells) after the moment when the Achehnese — among whom several hadjis in white were observed — showed themselves against the horizon.
On the march to Selimoen the guns passed, under fire, the swampy strip of ground at the foot of the same ridge beneath which the battery had stood in the Kepaja Doewa affair, crossing by an improvised bridge of wood found on the spot, the horses led over one by one and the ammunition carried across by the gunners themselves. On 14 August, before the kampong Lepong-Bajoe, the battery fired fourteen shells and mortar-throws, of which six — presumably wetted in the debarkation, when some ammunition chests had been soaked — failed to burst. For the ascent of the berg-plateau on the return march of 19 August ten to twenty dwangarbeiders with drag-ropes were posted at every wheel in addition to the gun detachments and the Mineurs. After the final disembarkation at Oleh-leh on 3 September 1879 the section of guns with one section of mortars marched to the post of Toengkoep, the other mortar section to Lambaroe, broken down by sickness.
See Also
- Lamtoba column (1879)
- Bergartillerie Bergbatterijen
- Punitive expedition against Kepaja Doewa (August 1879)
- Selimoen Expedition (August 1879)
- Toengkoep
- 1879
Source
Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis, door W. Cool en G. B. Hooijer (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1889), pp. 5-6, 16, 19-20, 26-27, 39-40, 49-50, 61, 75. OCR-filename: 20260720_115822_DLP-135-Eene_schoone_bladzijde_uit_Atjeh_s_geschiedenis_Nemotron_OCR_v2_OCR.txt.