F. de Bas was a major of the General Staff (Majoor van den Generalen Staf) who, in No. 1 of the Militaire Spectator of 1886 (pp. 10-11), came forward to a certain degree as a champion of the conduct of general van Swieten in Atjeh — one of the last public moves in the old controversy between the apologists of the wait-and-see posture of 1874 and its critics, to which Verstege’s pamphlet of the same year had given new fuel. Verstege names him, together with the Militaire Spectator itself — the oldest military journal of the Netherlands, which had taken sides for the waiting posture “from the very beginning” — in his demonstration that the champions of the passive posture forgot that the military history could not point to a single example in which a militant, freedom-loving people had been brought to submission by mere passive waiting (see Afwachtende houding).
See Also
Source
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), p. 26 note. OCR-filename: 20260801_235605_DLP-158-Een_beroep_op_het_Nederlandsche_volk_in_zake_het_Atjeh_vraagstuk_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.