Gelsdorp was the luitenant-adjudant (lieutenant-adjutant) of the 6e Bataljon Infanterie who took part in 1879 in the expedition of the Lamtoba column to Lampanas, Lamtoba and Selimoen, and whose death at Atjeh a month after the tocht — of the sickness contracted in the valley, as the authors intimate — is the subject of the most personal passage of W. Cool and G. B. Hooijer’s Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis (1889).
The night reverie at Lamtoba
Of all the officers of the column, the authors wrote, none remained longer outside the bivak after the sudden tropical nightfall, when the hills and mountains ran together into one colossal dark wall closing the plain of Lamtoba like a prison, than Gelsdorp. While the sky above the Goudberg slowly lightened and the starlight paled before the unrisen moon, his thoughts — as the authors render them — drifted from the monotonous present to silver-lit images of the past: the friendly house with his young wife and three little children as he had last seen it on Java, bathed in the fierce sunlight. Then the moon rose above the mountains, its rays drawing the shadows out of the valley, the hills signing themselves with fine lines of light above the woolly, milk-white layer of dew that was beginning to cover the plain.
The authors close the vignette with the question that the sequel compelled: “Sloop wellicht met de koude rilling, die de verradelijke Indische nachtlucht door de leden jaagt, de kiem der ziekte in het bloed, die hem een maand later ten grave sleepte?” — did, perhaps with the cold shiver that the treacherous Indies night air drives through the limbs, the germ of the sickness slip into the blood that a month later dragged him to his grave? His ashes, they wrote, rest in peace on the overcrowded churchyard of Petjoet, amidst the many who like him fell as offerings of our colonial existence — “te midden der velen, die evenals hij vielen als offers van ons koloniaal bestaan.”
Significance
The Gelsdorp passage is the book’s emblem of the price of the “beautiful page”: the officer’s family on Java named in the same breath as the cemetery at Petjoet. Together with the sickness statistics of the Lampanas quarantine, it grounds the authors’ closing appeal that the nation not let the sacrifices of the Indies army be forgotten — “U deelgenoot te maken … welke ellende zelfs aan de overwinning kleeft” — how great the sacrifices are that every protracted expedition in the tropics drags after it, what misery cleaves even to victory.
See Also
- 6e Bataljon Infanterie
- Lamtoba column (1879)
- Lamtoba
- Peutjoet
- Quarantine at Lampanas (August–September 1879)
- 1879
Source
Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis, door W. Cool en G. B. Hooijer (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1889), p. 33. OCR-filename: 20260720_115822_DLP-135-Eene_schoone_bladzijde_uit_Atjeh_s_geschiedenis_Nemotron_OCR_v2_OCR.txt.