Mosselman — oud-brigadecommandant Mosselman, vermaard in Zentgraff’s phrase — was one of the most celebrated Dutch brigadecommandanten of the Korps Maréchaussée in the last phase of the Atjeh-oorlog. He is the principal narrator of the chapter “Hoe Tjoet Ali sjahid werd” — though actually his great krijgsbedrijf was the overval of 25 October 1910 at the Kroeëng Peutoeë, for which he received the Willemsorde 3e klasse.
The 22-25 October 1910 patrol
On 22 October 1910 Mosselman was ordered out of Lho Soekon at 9 p.m. to investigate a sterke bende reported in the night of 20–21 October west of Lho Reuhat. With him were 16 maréchaussée’s — telden wij 18 karabijnen (we counted 18 carbines, including his panglima and himself). He took the bende’s sporen southward through the Boekit-paja’s, then eastward; eind oktober 1910, op den derden dag van dien tocht, vlak op de versche bekas zat in een zijriviertje van de Kroeëng Peutoeë — on the third day of that march, right on the fresh tracks in a side-rivulet of the Kroeëng Peutoeë, hoe de vluchtelingen ook hadden getracht, de sporen te doen verdwijnen (howsoever the fugitives had tried to make the tracks disappear). On 25 October 1910 his brigade overvalled the bende. In het geheel liet de vijand 7 dooden, waaronder het bendehoofd en eene vrouw, die aan het gevecht deelnam, in onze handen en werden buit gemaakt: geweer M. ‘95, Beaumontkarabijn, munitie, blanke wapens, het zegel en de lijfwapens van Tgk. Sjech di Paja Bakong, alias Tgk. Seupot Mata. — In all the enemy left 7 dead in our hands, including the bende-head and a woman who took part in the fight, and there were captured: a M.95 rifle, a Beaumont carbine, ammunition, blanke wapens, the seal and the personal weapons of Tgk. Sjech di Paja Bakong, alias Tgk. Seupot Mata. The woman was Tjoet Meuthia — de Parel — mother of het adelaarsjong. The boy, then ten, was in the beek fishing when “Kaphé datang” was cried; his bewaker snatched him up and ran into the bosch: “Saja tida lihat lagi iboe” — I have not seen my mother again.
The Willemsorde 3e klasse
For this krijgsbedrijf Mosselman kreeg er de Willems-orde 3de klasse voor — received the Military Willems-Order 3rd class. The official report and his own narrative of the patrol — „I would, it were evening, Hall, and all well” (Shakespeare, after the march) — are Zentgraff’s principal source for the chapter.
Limbar’s mental-health crisis
Mosselman’s keutjhi (corporal) Limbar — mooi gedecoreerd (beautifully decorated) — begon-ie een beetje raar te doen (began to act a bit strange) after long years in the kleine oorlog. At Padang Tidji he stood before the mirror in goudpapier on his white pantalon, veel tressen en krulsen, boven z’n beteekenis opgedirkt (above his station dressed up) — “als een Indisch hoofdcommissaris van politie in groot-tenue, zooiets tusschen een Groot-Admiraal en een veldmaarschalk.” Limbar: “Apa sergeant tida tahoe saja sekarang djendral?” — Sergeant doesn’t know that I am now a general? Mosselman’s command: “Rechts om! Geef acht!” (Limbar hesitated one second and snapped to attention). “Sekarang djendral mesti klein tenue. Ingerukt… marsch!” — Now the general must be in undress. Dismissed… march! At a later patrol, when Limbar — being punished for losing the bende’s bekas — came before Mosselman with the karabijn in his hand and a strange cold look, „Kenapa sekarang korporaal Limbar tida lakoe lagi?” — Why does corporal Limbar no longer function? — Mosselman’s command „Zet af karabijn!” (Limbar set it on the ground), „Aan den schouder… karabijn! Ingerukt… marsch!” brought him back from the edge. De opkomende waanzin liet haar greep op den korporaal los (the rising madness released its grip on the corporal). Limbar was afgekeurd and when his Militaire Willemsorde came, belooning voor zijn schitterende daden, he lay in the gekkenafdeeling at Koetaradja, where Mosselman visited him; he had made himself a ridderorde out of a tin lid, en deze droeg Limbar, die in bed lag, op de borst. He died not long after at the krankzinnigengesticht te Buitenzorg — het einde van een braaf keutjhi — the end of a brave corporal.
The wild pig at Koeta Tjané with Willem van Leuven
In the Alas-dal near Koeta Tjané Mosselman, terugkeerend naar zijn brigade, heard geritsel in a suikerriettuintje and saw a groot varken that regelrecht op hem afkwam — so that he was verplicht (obliged) to shoot it. Willem van Leuven|Willem — the slagersjongen-turned-sergeant — was summoned: “Willem, hier is een tjèlèng; maak er eens wat van” — Willem, here is a pig; make something of it. Willem came, looked at the animal met halfgesloten oogen, stelde zijn oogen op het grootste diaphragma, looked at Mosselman: “Een echt wild varken” — a real wild pig. The animal was hung, opened, and boned naar de regelen der kunst (according to the rules of the art), and the next day groote zijden spek, een paar vingers dik, en een paar hammen in den rook (great flitches of bacon, a couple of fingers thick, and a couple of hams in the smoke) hung in the bivak. Kapitein Muurling was content met deze verklaring (was content with this explanation). Eerlijk gezegd geloof ik er geen woord van — Honestly I don’t believe a word of it, Zentgraff comments; ik denk dat Mosselman, die zich terdege herinnert dat de Chinees dagen later met een claim is gekomen (natuurlijk afgepoeierd), het verhaal zoo dikwijls heeft gedaan dat hij het nu zelf gelooft, of dat hij bang is voor „navordering” (I think that Mosselman, who thoroughly remembers that the Chinese came days later with a claim — fended off, of course — has told the story so often that he now believes it himself, or that he is afraid of a reassessment).
Significance
Mosselman is the type of the old brigadecommandant of the Atjeh-oorlog: a sergeant who, na lange jaren het leven in den kleinen oorlog te hebben meegemaakt, knew his brigade as a trimoerti, who could bring a mad corporal back from the edge with a single command, and who ran a bende of Tiro-oelama’s to ground at the Kroeëng Peutoeë. Het is opmerkelijk, maar wanneer je nu, eene kwart eeuw later, Mosselman over dat varken spreekt dan draait hij subiet en met groote snelheid datzelfde verhaal af — even now, a quarter-century later, Mosselman, asked about that pig, reels off the same story with great speed.
The pursuit of 22–25 October 1910
Mosselman had marched out from Lho’ Soekon on 22 October 1910 with the 1st brigade of the 5th Division to trace a band reported at Lho’ Reuhat. That trail crossed the path of Tjoet Meutia, travelling with her son T. Radja Sabi towards the Gajòland to seek Tgk. di Mata Ië; on the third day Mosselman was on fresh tracks in a side-stream of the Kroeëng Peutòë.
The pursuit was made difficult by the skill of the djahats, who first lured him in a false direction and then repeatedly gave new “spoorzoekers-maatjes.” Mosselman had largely younger soldiers with him and only one real tracker, Wokas. At last, thanks to Wokas, the right trail was found — a band that had fanned out, each part concealing its traces and choosing different paths, to reunite at an agreed point. From the tracks Mosselman concluded that this was not a mere “bendetje” but “groot wild.” (“big game”)
When he had only one day’s food left, the band was at most two days ahead. To forage again meant a great loss of time and the risk of discovery. The troops were exhausted, with many foot-wounds from the tough, sucking mud. But Mosselman had discovered that his marechaussée covered in about five hours a distance for which the band needed a day’s march; if that held, and it was not improbable with a band of certainly sixty persons including probably women and older people carrying their supplies, then there was a chance — “provided on a more or less empty stomach.” It remained a risk, but Mosselman was a brigade commander of the good old school, and he still had two tins of oatmeal in his petroleum can as a last reserve.
On 25 October cooking began early, though sparingly: the rice available for three meals had to serve for at least six, and this was properly supervised. Then a young marechaussée stumbled at a waterfall and fell twenty metres; nothing was broken, but towards noon “the man of the waterfall gave out.” He was young and unseasoned and had not yet learned to bite on his teeth. Mosselman then did the only thing he could do, and what is naturally forbidden “according to the regulations” and can indeed cause great disasters with unseasoned brigades: he left six men with his native sergeant and the convicts behind with the sick man — but, in view of the possibility of losing the way, also Wokas. That nearly cost Mosselman his success, and cost Wokas a doubly earned chance of a decoration; but Wokas was a marechaussée and bore the setback as such.
Mosselman’s own instruction ran: “If the man could no longer follow, then sergeant Ribin was to build him a platform in a tree as a kind of look-out post. In it he could then leave the sick man with two of the convict labourers and the tent-sheets with my baggage, and follow me again as fast as possible with the bearer of the carrying-litter and the dressing-tins.” He gave that order emphatically in the hearing of the whole brigade, to free it of all responsibility — and hoped, rightly as it turned out, that with that prospect the “sick” man would be able to walk after all.
Towards two o’clock two more marechaussée gave up as well and “they settled down for a chat”; du Croo noted in mitigation that Mosselman had not long been serving with this division and commanding his brigade, and that in a brigade welded by long association into an unbreakable unity — such as Schmidt’s famous 5th and 6th brigades of the 3rd Division — such lapses do not occur. Ten tired men now remained, against a band of certainly sixty.
The “five-hour theory” proved correct: at ten o’clock they found a place where the band had bivouacked; the band would therefore probably make a bivouac again that day about three, and that bivouac Mosselman had to reach and attack the same day. Another man was left behind with the pair, to wait until sergeant Ribin closed up; and with seven men the pursuit went on. Again the tracks were sought along the kr. Peutòë, again lost — Wokas was no longer there — again sought, and at last a footprint found on a little sandbank in a small side-brook. Waterfalls, boulders, climbing, descending, balancing on slippery stones, until towards four o’clock, after a stiff scramble, Mosselman saw smoke above the trees.
The action
His own account, as printed by H. C. Zentgraaff and quoted by du Croo, continues: ”…I was just about to slip into the forest to choose the best route for stalking and surprise when one of my boys called out ‘distoe!’ (over there!). Looking in the direction he indicated, I saw at about 200 metres an Acehnese disappearing at a run into a side creek. Then no plan of surprise can be made any longer, and only speed can still bring any success. ‘Charge!’”
All seven charged at top speed to the aloeë, tumbling and falling over the stones, and up the side-brook. Some 150 metres from its mouth they found a marching bivouac under construction, hastily abandoned with all supplies left behind. They ran on and came upon the band about to cross the stream some thirty metres ahead. Mamahit, then in front, pointed out an old man being helped along by three others, trying to escape into the forest, and fired; the old man fell wounded.
“Immediately all hell broke loose”: all three were fired on at close range from the wooded banks on every side. “All three of us looked at one another at the same moment. For my part I certainly thought — and afterwards Tarmin and Mamahit said that they had thought the same — that our end had come.” Mosselman jumped into a pool of the bend, the steep washed-out rock wall behind them; they stood to the waist in water, “literally with our backs to the wall.”
The remaining four men, hearing the first heavy firing near the abandoned bivouac, had stormed up the slope and finally opened a heavy fire in the rear of the marksmen. That, Mosselman judged, was tactics: had they come dribbling up one by one along the aloeë it would have made little impression, and he believed they would all have been overrun.
While the three stood cursing in three languages, it was music in their ears when they heard the rapid fire and the shouting: “Madjoe, hantam marsausee!” (“Forward, strike them, marechaussée (“military constabulary”)!”). The enemy probably supposed himself surrounded, since he must have understood that the Kompeuni would not send three marechaussée so far into the forest. Hesitation and stagnation came into his shooting; the inciting “La illaha illalah” faded; and when the four men with Wakary and Sinkey in front suddenly sprang out of the riverine forest into the bed, Mosselman used the hesitation immediately to charge into the forest where he suspected the thickest knot.
Before them lay the old man. From behind boulders two vigorous young men sprang up, covering the fallen man with their bodies, klewang and rentjong in their fists; “they had to be cut down.” Leaping over the old man, Mosselman saw he was already dead, lying still and not reacting to the hand-to-hand fight above him; he glimpsed the golden weapon, the famous “bawar”, and it flashed through him that this was “een Hooge” — as did also “the self-sacrificing manner in which he was defended by those two young men, who truly died a hero’s death.”
They stormed on into the forest. The marksmen there did not await them; only one man sprang out from behind a tree with his klewang — “I can still see the great wart beside his nose, still feel my impression of an exceedingly ugly fellow, as I parried and my klewang clove his neck…”
Of further pursuit of the rest of the band little came. Mosselman whistled his six men together and returned to the scene of the fight. “We looked like rags. I had a couple of great tears in my clothes and felt scratches and painful places everywhere; how I got them I did not know … A corner had been shot off Tarmin’s cartridge pouch; for the rest we were, as by a miracle, unhurt.”
So fell “the great blind resistance leader, venerated as a saint, Teungkoe Sjeh di Paja Bakong (Seupot Mata), his son Tgk. Mat Saleh, and Tjoet Meutia as well.”
Later life and correspondence with Swart
Mosselman later transferred to the flying service and was pensioned as onderluitenant with the rank of second lieutenant. He remained in touch with his old chief. On 12 September 1936 he wrote to Swart from De Hoenderhof at Tandjoengsari near Bandoeng, timing the letter for the mail boat of 16 September which by the table would arrive in the Netherlands on 11 October, so that it would lie in the letter-box exactly on Swart’s birthday; the letter closed “uw oud-brigadecommandant, Mosselman,” with the promise of drinking an otherwise forbidden oorlam to His Excellency’s health on 12 October.
Significance (du Croo, 1943)
The pursuit of October 1910 is the fullest single narrative in du Croo’s book of what marechaussée patrol work actually consisted of — tracking, hunger, exhaustion, improvisation against regulations — and its outcome, the deaths of Tgk. Sjeh di Paja Bakong and Tjoet Meutia a month after that of Pang Nanggròë, effectively ended organised resistance in Keureutòë.
Account from the Maréchaussée Jubileum-nummer (1930) — service record and memoir
the 1930 jubilee number of Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië carried both a portrait notice of Mosselman’s career and his signed memoir Herinnering van een oud-Maréchaussee, one of the two extended first-person accounts in the issue.
Service record
Born on 8 September 1884, Mosselman entered military service on 16 April 1900 as a soldier with the Instructie-Bataljon at Kampen, was promoted corporal on 8 August of the same year, and transferred on 8 September 1907 to the Grenadiers en Jagers. He passed the sergeant’s examination in April 1902 and departed in that rank for the Indies in April 1904, serving with the Korps Maréchaussée from December 1906 to January 1912. As sergeant of Maréchaussée he received the Militaire Willems-Orde 3rd class in 1912; the Overzicht van Onderscheidingen printed in the 1930 jubilee number of Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië records the award to Eur. Sergt. Mar. W. J. Mosselman, Alg. Stb. No. 58330. He then rose through the ranks to onderluitenant.
In 1916 he transferred to the Luchtvaart-Afdeeling, and belongs with the former captain of Artillery W. Leendertz to the first two Netherlands-Indies military aviators to obtain the Internationaal vliegbrevet. On his retirement in 1922 he was retained as reserve lieutenant for special services, and signed his memoir “W. J. Mosselman, reserve-luitenant der Infanterie.”
The memoir
The memoir opens with the corps song O, marsausee, whose refrain “Satoe mati, ganti sepoeloeh” he took as expressing the core of the old corps spirit — “de taaie vasthoudendheid van den terrier, de zorgelooze bereidheid tot het groote offer.”
He described entry into the corps as entirely voluntary, every supplementary requisition on the infantry carrying the words “geschikt en… genegen” — in which genegen implied the command’s recognition that more would be asked of a maréchaussée than could be expected of the mass. Whoever could not give that “deed beter weg te blijven.”
He set out the corps’s internal vocabulary borrowed from the Acehnese enemy — officers as Oeleuhbalangs, European non-commissioned officers as Toekoes, indigenous sergeants as Panglima’s, corporals as Keutjih’s and the men as Kawans — for which see Maréchaussée-vocabulaire; and described the friction with the ordinary infantry, who called the corps “een zootje, een vrijgevochten bende” and sometimes refused it space inside their wire.
He recalled his men by name — Kromodimedjo, Sarpan, Diroen, Patty, Wattimena, Limba, Wokas, Mamahit, Sengkey and Mioen — adding that the events of his later life had buried their names, “maar jelui gestalten, zij zijn niet bedolven.” He recalled the family life of brigade doea-blas of the 1st and of the 5th Division, and narrated at length the wandering march in the Barisan mountains in which his patrol nearly starved.
The passage on the forgotten veterans
The most severe passage in the whole jubilee number is Mosselman’s on the corps’s disabled and pensioned indigenous veterans. Patched and repaired, sent from hospital to hospital, many had wasted away and found a quiet grave in the dessa, “zonder tromgeroffel en zonder salvo’s” — without drum-roll and without volleys — forgotten and unrecognised by the Netherlands. For a while they had vegetated on a “hongerpensioentje” tossed to them for the sake of appearances; after offering their strength and lives on the altar of the community they had been carried off “als vergeten cadavers.” “De Moor had zijn plicht gedaan, de Moor kon gaan” — the saying, he wrote, fitted here with painful literalness.
He absolved the corps itself — “Ons Korps als zoodanig staat immers onschuldig aan jelui misère” — and laid the matter at the door of the community represented in the government: “een kwestie van dankbaarheid, van waardeering en, zooals ik ook wel heb hooren zeggen, een kwestie van Eereschuld.” He nevertheless rejoiced with the serving men, because the gift of the vaandel meant “tenminste een ideëele erkenning, een ideëele belooning” of what “gij, roemvolle stakkers” had wrought.
He added a reflection on his own responsibility: “zooals ik hun krachten nam en verspilde, zoo heb ik ook met de mijne gehandeld.” In the end it was not he, their Toekoe, who had demanded it, “het was Nederland, het was de Maatschappij, die jelui opeischte” for the pioneer labour that had to precede the bringing of peace, order and prosperity to the Indies.
See Also
- Tengkoe Sjech di Paja Bakong
- Tjoet Meuthia
- T. Radja Sabi
- Death of Tjoet Meuthia (1910)
- Willem van Leuven
- Willemsorde 3e klasse
- Limbar
- Muurling
- Korps Marechaussee van Atjeh en Onderhorigen
- Lho Soekon
- Lho Reuhat
- Kroeëng Peutoeë
- Koeta Tjané
- Padang Tidji
- Koetaradja
- Buitenzorg
- 1910
- 20th-century
- Aceh War
- Tgk. Sjeh di Paja Bakong
- Tjoet Meutia
- Wokas
- Kroeëng Peutòë
- Corps of Military Constabulary of Atjeh and Dependencies
- H. C. Zentgraaff
- H. N. A. Swart
- Het Korps Maréchaussée in Atjeh (Jubileum-nummer 1930)
- Dwaaltocht in het Barisangebergte (Mosselman’s account)
- Maréchaussée-vocabulaire
- Luchtvaart-Afdeeling (Netherlands Indies)
- W. Leendertz
- Korps Maréchaussée te voet in Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden
Source
Atjeh, door H.C. Zentgraff. Gedrukt bij Drukkerij “De Unie”, 1938, Batavia. OCR-filename: 20260709_002148_DLP-81-Atjeh_OCR.txt.
Generaal Swart, Pacificator van Atjeh (“General Swart, Pacifier of Atjeh”), by M. H. du Croo, Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with the collaboration of H. J. Schmidt, Titular Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with a foreword by His Excellency Lieutenant-General K.N.I.L. (retired) G. K. Dijkstra (Maastricht: N.V. Leiter-Nypels, 1943), Chapter X, pp. 98–101; Chapter XVII, p. 161.
Het Korps Maréchaussée in Atjeh: De Atjehsche Garde, 1890 - 2 April 1930 (“The Corps of Maréchaussée in Atjeh: The Atjehnese Guard”), Extra Jubileum-nummer of Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië issued for the fortieth anniversary of the corps (1930), pp. 1-16. Offprint DLP-143, Bibliotheek KITLV, accession 621 116 794.