I. Feenstra was the Dutch journalist who was in Atjeh during the farewell days of September 1918 and wrote for the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant of 20 May 1919 the fullest account of H. N. A. Swart’s departure.
Feenstra had stood, as all did, in the reading room of the Atjehclub under the portraits of all the Atjeh generals, and reflected on what each had been able to hand to the next: at first “authority over narrow little coastal states … sometimes only a semblance of authority; sometimes established only with blood.” He traced the transformation of the insurgent peoples into bands, of the bands into small parties with cold steel, and of those into isolated men — “tough wild men who preferred the freedom of the well-hidden field to the registered village pass.” He praised Swart for having understood, in ten years of governing Atjeh, “not to behave like a general and to be exclusively a governor,” and defined the true art: “it is a great generalship to demolish those barracks that have become superfluous and to widen the intervals as tempers grow calmer… and the strategic motor roads better.” But he cautioned against the title itself: “the traveller … knows well that there was not one single pacifier.”
See Also
Source
Generaal Swart, Pacificator van Atjeh (“General Swart, Pacifier of Atjeh”), by M. H. du Croo, Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with the collaboration of H. J. Schmidt, Titular Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with a foreword by His Excellency Lieutenant-General K.N.I.L. (retired) G. K. Dijkstra (Maastricht: N.V. Leiter-Nypels, 1943), Chapter XVI.