Majoor Gerlach was an officer and battalion commander of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army who served in the Aceh Sultanate during the Second Aceh Expedition and subsequent occupation operations. As Luitenant-Kolonel he commanded in 1879 the Lamtoba column — the seaborne column that landed at Lampanas on 27 July 1879, occupied the valley of Lamtoba, and marched over the mountains to Selimoen — the operation celebrated by his chief of the staff W. Cool and his brigade-chief G. B. Hooijer in Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis (1889).
Command in Aceh
In Atjeh gedurende de tweede expeditie en later (1876), Majoor Gerlach is recorded as commanding infantry detachments during defensive and clearing operations around Kotta Alam and Penajoeng, maintaining supply communications for General J. van Swieten and General J. L. J. H. Pel.
The Lamtoba–Selimoen column of 1879
In the summer of 1879, after the conquest of the XXII and the XXVI Moekims by Generaal van der Heijden, the then Luitenant-Kolonel Gerlach — “the Overste Gerlach” of the narrative — was placed at the head of a column of 46 officers and 1,104 men with 984 labourers, artillery and engineers, and sent by sea from Oleh-leh with the order to operate from Lampanas against the valley of Lamtoba, whither the fugitive chiefs of the XXVI Moekims had withdrawn. The landing of 27 July uncontested, Gerlach chose with the headman Toekoe Mas the bivouac ground, left two companies under Kapitein Bedet as guard of the sea-base, and marched on 28 July; the march-order there issued — Coblijn’s strengthened voorhoede with artillery and Mineurs, Ducroo at the hoofdtroep, Du Bus de Valempré at the rear — is the model the book gives of a column marching with security measures through unknown mountain country. His own place he kept unbound, “there where his presence mattered most: as a rule with the gros of the voorhoede.”
During the fortnight’s occupation of the Lamtoba valley Gerlach received and sternly addressed the Iman, holding him at his side as a pledge for the surrender of weapons and obliged building-materials; decided, after the wakils’ empty-handed return, the punitive march against Kepaja Doewa; enforced by reprisal the return of the fugitive Rijksbestierder Panglima Banten (6 August); presided over the identification and judgement, in Panglima Banten’s mediation, of the sixty-seven refugees of the XXVI Moekims taken in the night march — in whose midst smallpox was found — and communicated to the chiefs the Militaire Bevelhebber’s substitution of the waarborgsom for the threatened burning of the valley.
Against the march to Selimoen of 13 August Gerlach took, on the delayed arrival of the orders of 11 August, the measures for the composition of the striking column, and led it past the stormed position of Kepaja Doewa, the burned Lam-Lepong and the taken Lepong-Baijoe to Selimoen, where on 15 August he took over the general command from Majoor Lubeck. He concurred in Lubeck’s dispensation of Toekoe Moeda Daoed from hostages — “the conqueror surely also had the right to demand” better lodgings for his exhausted soldiers, he judged, when he declined the hope, held out through Controleur Kamp, that the second column would bivouac wholly outside the kampong. On 17 August he weighed, in long deliberation with his staff, the pursuit of the chiefs fled to Reng-Reng, and abandoned it. The return over the mountains and the evacuation of the valley — the taking of the Iman, the Rijksbestierder and half of the wakils as hostages where the waarborgsom could not be paid — he closed with the march in two divisions, commanding himself the fast first division which brought the sick in one day to Lampanas. Through the quarantine of 23 August–2 September he directed the embarkation, settled with Kapitein-Luitenant Greve of the Merapi, and on 4 September 1879 brought the last division back to Oleh-leh.
Account from Verstege’s Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk (1886)
Verstege builds his chapter on the Atjehnese national character largely on Kolonel Gerlach’s 1878 booklet about the Atjehers (“uitgegeven in 1878”), cited “on the authority of different old historians”: “Geen volk van den Indischen Archipel was tot zulk een laag peil van zedeloosheid en kwade trouw gezonken. Wanneer zij door geweld hun doel niet konden bereiken, waren huichelarij, omkooping en trouwbreuk de wapenen, waarvan zij zich bedienden, en die zij meesterlijk wisten te voeren” (“No people of the Indian Archipelago had sunk to so low a level of immorality and bad faith. When they could not reach their aim by violence, hypocrisy, bribery and breach of faith were the weapons to which they resorted, and which they knew how to wield masterfully”. Gerlach placed beside the examples of inhuman cruelty the sentence: “Het besef hunner onafhankelijkheid heeft een ijdelen waan en een overdreven trots op eigen kracht en sterkte bij hen opgewekt” (“The sense of their independence had awakened in them an idle delusion and an excessive pride in their own power and strength”), and the conclusion: “De geschiedenis doet hen kennen als moordzuchtige krijgslieden, roofzuchtige onderhandelaars en oneerlijke kooplieden. Een heden bezwooren traktaat wordt morgen verbroken, eene pas afgelegde gelofte straks ontkend, en de onervaren handelaar in alles bedrogen” (“History shows them as murderous warriors, rapacious negotiators and dishonest traders. A treaty sworn today is broken tomorrow, a newly made vow soon denied, and the inexperienced trader deceived in everything”). On that ground Verstege re-examined the Dutch illusions: after the first expedition’s thoroughly explainable defeat, after the premature ending and homeward turning of the second without the people’s submission, after years of Atjeh-trifling and the retreat of 1 March 1885, the Atjehsche belief in their own invincibility must have been excited and fanned more than ever (see Radja Ibrahim (1521) for the eldest historical example Gerlach’s story gives).
See Also
- Royal Netherlands East Indies Army
- Kotta Alam
- J. van Swieten
- J. L. J. H. Pel
- Lamtoba column (1879)
- Selimoen Expedition (August 1879)
- Lamtoba
- Selimoen
- Lampanas
- General van der Heijden
- 1879
Source
Atjeh gedurende de tweede expeditie en later, Een Oud Officier, Batavia: Ogilvie & Co., 1876, pp. 11-16, 58-60.
Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis, door W. Cool en G. B. Hooijer (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1889), passim, esp. pp. 22-24, 37-38, 52-58, 64-67, 71-76. OCR-filename: 20260720_115822_DLP-135-Eene_schoone_bladzijde_uit_Atjeh_s_geschiedenis_Nemotron_OCR_v2_OCR.txt.
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 10-11. OCR: DLP-158.