Jan Fuselier was a Dutch officer of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (Dutch: *Indische Leger*) mentioned in the source document DLP-84-Atjeh as one of the few who could not tolerate the self-effacing devotion of the soldier-pastor Pastoor H. C. Verbraak during the closing campaigns of the Atjeh-oorlog of 1873–1904 in Atjeh. His comment, preserved in the biographical literature on the chaplaincy, underscores by its very irritation the high regard in which Verbraak was held by the rank and file of the colonial forces — and the discomfort that a chaplain of conspicuous holiness could provoke among officers more accustomed to the conventions of garrison life at Koeta-Radja.
Role in Atjeh
Fuselier served in the colonial forces during the period of the Aceh War, interacting with the Catholic and Protestant chaplains who tended to the soldiers’ spiritual and material needs along the Atjeh-tram postenlinie and at the military hospital (Dutch: militair hospitaal) of Panteh Perak. The chaplaincy that Verbraak and the Ambonese Inlands Godsdienstleraar (Dutch: indigenous religion teacher) Ds. Thenu exercised was, by the testimony of the biographer Dr. Alb. C. Kruijt, not the rulebook chaplaincy of the colonial establishment but a patient daily presence at the bedsides of the dying, on the march, and in the field. Fuselier’s comment — that he could not stomach the spectacle of the soldaten-pastoor’s self-abnegation — is recorded in the biographical literature precisely because it was exceptional: most officers accepted, and many revered, the priest who wore threadbare soutane and enormous clumsy shoes on his rounds of the forward posts.
Significance
Fuselier’s place in the record is small but diagnostic. His discomfort is the negative against which the positive of Verbraak’s reputation is developed in the biographical accounts: the chaplain whose holiness was so conspicuous that even a brother officer, accustomed to the brutalities of colonial war, found it difficult to bear. The episode belongs to the wider corpus of anecdotes that fixed Verbraak — together with Ds. Thenu — as the type of the colonial military chaplain (Dutch: veldprediker) in Atjeh, and it is preserved in the same body of literature that recorded the 1885 consecration of the first Catholic church at Kotta-Radja, the 1896 chapel at Olehleh, and the bronze statue raised to Verbraak at Bandoeng in 1922. The anecdote thus connects the garrison culture of the Van Heutsz era with the memorial culture of the post-war Netherlands.
See Also
- Pastoor Verbraak
- Ds. Thenu
- Aceh War
- Indische Leger
- Koeta-Radja
- Atjeh-tram
- Pante Perak
- Dr. Kruijt
- Van Heutsz
- Olehleh
- Bandung
Source
DLP-84-Atjeh.pdf, pp. 6–7.