M. T. H. Perelaer was a major (Majoor) and former brother-in-arms (krijgsmakker) of Overste Verstege, whose words at the Burgerpligt meeting of 26 January 1886 were printed as Bijlage A of Verstege’s pamphlet Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk. Perelaer supplied the one lacuna he had noticed in Verstege’s lecture: a practically continuous series, which he had kept since the date the concentration was executed, of incidents inside the new line — the losses suffered by the Dutch behind their own palisades.
His speech at Burgerpligt
Perelaer paid homage to Verstege’s introduction of the Atjeh question “in Netherlands’ first trading city”, to an association of men who could do so much good for the dear fatherland. “Ik meen in sprekers rede eene leemte opgemerkt te hebben, die mij gespeten heeft” (“I think I noticed in the speaker’s address a lacuna, which vexed me”), he said: Verstege had feelingly described what the soldier had suffered when he had to go backwards, but had omitted an overview of the losses inflicted after the so highly praised concentration. Perelaer had his jottings ready — expressly without claim to completeness — that wonderfully joined on to what had been said that evening; the list, beginning with the attack on the watch at Penditi near Kota Radja at the closing of the line in February 1885 and ending roughly a year later, is preserved in the article Guerilla raids inside the concentration line (1885).
On the demoralisation of the soldier
On the basis of that “treurige lijst” (sad list) Perelaer pointed to what such a state must bring about in the soldier’s soul: exposed — though told he was on a peace footing — systematically to ambush and sneak attack by a restless enemy whose hiding-places he could see at a short distance outside the line but whom he was not allowed to seek out there, “dien hij daar niet mag opzoeken, dien hij daar niet onder de oogen mag treden”. “Getierceerd door allerlei ziekten … gedecimeerd door een onbezweken vijand, die door onze militaire tinnegieters in den Haag in staat gesteld wordt de snoodste aanslagen te smeden en uit te voeren, bedrogen in zijne geldelijke inkomsten door de vredesfictie … moet het moreel van den soldaat deerlijk aangetast worden” (“Harassed by all kinds of diseases … decimated by an unsubdued enemy, who is enabled by our military tin-founders in The Hague to forge and execute the basest plots, cheated in his pay by the stubbornly upheld fiction of peace … the morale of the soldier must be miserably affected”). Nor, Perelaer warned, was the evil spotted only in Atjeh: through the constant reliefs the downhearted returned to Java and elsewhere, and what they had to tell was of so sad a kind that it could not work inspiritingly — “en zoo breidt het euvel zich als de olievlek uit” (“and so the evil spreads like the oil stain”). He closed by recalling that the eminent colonial statesman Jean Crétien Baud had once declared that the small force that maintained Dutch authority in the Indies could measure itself with all armies of the same strength in the whole world, and asked who would dare to subscribe that still.
See Also
- J. J. W. E. Verstege
- Guerilla raids inside the concentration line (1885)
- Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk (Verstege, 1886)
- Kiesvereeniging Burgerpligt
- 1885
- 1886
Source
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 108-111. OCR-filename: 20260801_235605_DLP-158-Een_beroep_op_het_Nederlandsche_volk_in_zake_het_Atjeh_vraagstuk_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.