J. Alting van Geusau was the author of the 1939 article De tocht van Overste van Daalen door de Gajo-, Alas- en Bataklanden (8 Febr.–23 Juli 1904) (“The march of Colonel van Daalen through the Gayo, Alas, and Batak lands, 8 February–23 July 1904”), published in Indisch Militair Tijdschrift (Netherlands Indies Military Journal), No. 30, p. 593 e.v., with illustrations. The article is recorded as No. 566 in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940), in the Sumatra chapter.

The 1939 article

Geusau’s article, published in Indisch Militair Tijdschrift — the principal professional military journal of the Netherlands Indies — recorded the campaign of Colonel (Overste) van Daalen through the Gajo-, Alas-, and Bataklanden between 8 February and 23 July 1904. The campaign — the Colonne van Daalen of the corpus’s existing entry — was the military zegetocht (victorious campaign) by which the Gayo and Alas highlands of central Sumatra were brought under Dutch control. Geusau’s article is an independent retrospective account, published thirty-five years after the campaign, and it gives the precise dates of the campaign (8 February23 July 1904) and the inclusion of the Bataklands in the traverse. The article is a companion to the Harders account (No. 568) of the same campaign, published in the same year in the Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging.

Significance

For AcehWiki, J. Alting van Geusau is significant as the author of the 1939 retrospective on the van Daalen campaign of 1904 in the Indisch Militair Tijdschrift — an independent source for the campaign that complements the corpus’s existing accounts and the Harders account (No. 568).

See Also

Source

Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 566. Citing: J. Alting van Geusau, “De tocht van Overste van Daalen door de Gajo-, Alas- en Bataklanden. Met ills. (8 Febr.–23 Juli 1904),” Indisch Militair Tijdschrift, No. 30 (1939), p. 593 e.v.