Kapitein Van Rijn was an infantry captain of the Netherlands East Indies Army serving in the Lamtoba column of 1879 whose only recorded independent command in the campaign narrative of W. Cool and G. B. Hooijer was the forage march from the bivak at Selimoen to Ajer-Alang on 16 August 1879, during the closing days of the Selimoen expedition. The captain of the book is not further identified; whether he was connected with other officers of the name serving in the Indies is not stated.
The forage march to Ajer-Alang
On the morning of 16 August 1879 Van Rijn marched from the bivak at Selimoen at six o’clock with one and a half companies — the 3rd Company of the 6th Battalion and a peloton of the 3rd Company of the 9th Battalion — and with all the available coolies, some five hundred in number, to bring up provisions from the etappe-post at Ajer-Alang on the Atjeh-rivier, halfway between Indrapoeri and Selimoen. With the same movement four wounded and thirteen heavy sick were evacuated; as these could not remain at Ajer-Alang, the officer of health Nöckedved — “een Deen,” as the authors note — accompanied them through to Indrapoeri, returning the same evening.
The march, the authors reflect, could be measured on the map for its boldness: it traversed a country which only a few days before had been for the greater part unknown, which had always been accounted the centre of the resistance, and where the Dutch in the tocht to Gleiêng, little more than a year earlier, had seemed to have reached the limit of their penetration. Of enmity there was now no trace: white flags stood out everywhere, the population came out to meet the column, advice and help were sought for the many sick in the kampongs, and medicines were thankfully accepted. The transport returned on the afternoon of 18 August with a store greater than had been expected — provisions for more than three days — fired upon only once, at the crossing of the Atjeh river level with the abandoned bivak of Majoor Lubeck’s column, by some marauders from the mountains.
See Also
Source
Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis, door W. Cool en G. B. Hooijer (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1889), pp. 55-56, 58. OCR-filename: 20260720_115822_DLP-135-Eene_schoone_bladzijde_uit_Atjeh_s_geschiedenis_Nemotron_OCR_v2_OCR.txt.