Thijs de Fretes was an Ambonese sergeant 1e klasse of the K.N.I.L. who commanded the 1st brigade of the 6e Divisie Marechaussee at Bakongan in the dertiger jaren and is the protagonist of the chapter “Thijs” in Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L. — a woudloper, jager and buitengewoon schutter whose promotions came “op grond van zijn voor de vijand gebleken geschiktheid” rather than through the kaderschool, and whose plain-spoken Dutch (learned “in de kompenie”) and uncanny marksmanship in the rimboe made him one of the book’s set-piece portraits of Oom Ambon. After retirement he returned to Ambon and was still alive after the Second World War; his later fate is, in Dames’s word, “een groot vraagteken zonder een grafkruis.”
Promotion without the kaderschool
“Thijs was commandant van de le Brigade van de 6e Divisie Marechaussee, sergeant le klasse dus, maar de kaderschool had hij nimmer bezocht.” His promotions came entirely from what he had shown in front of the enemy. He could read, write and speak Dutch, but had learned the language “in de kompenie” — vloeken, spreken, lezen, schrijven — and his Dutch, when the new dokter’s wife at Bakongan asked him how the patrol had been, came out as: “„O, verdomd best Mevrouw, alleen dat verdomde, stinkende rotwater daar, dat is toch zo beroerd, ziet U!"" — which the Mevrouw “zich echt goed moest houden” before laughing it off later with the luitenants. The author observes that one had to have spent days in the Troemonse moerassen at Ië Itam and Ië Merah to understand the remark.
The jager in the rimboe
Thijs was a great woudloper, jager and buitengewoon schutter. The author lists a sequence of feats. He shot a tiger off a comrade’s body with a 6.5 mm karabijn through the brain — “dat schot moest zuiver in de hersens zitten, want het kaliber is eigenlijk te licht voor de grote jacht.” He crept alone into the middle of a kudde olifanten, set his karabijn “achter tegen het oor van het mannetje met de mooiste tanden” and shot it for its ivory. When the zelfbestuurder van Troemon reported a solitair (rogue elephant) that was dangerous to the bevolking to the visiting kolonel in 1933, Thijs promised the kolonel its tanden before the beast was shot — and shot it at five metres’ distance. He shot a boerong kleuëng (a kind of kiekendief) at fifty metres’ height with one shot, after the kampong had asked him to deal with a bird that had been stealing their kippen- en eendenkuikens for months; the kampong presented two kippen, a tiental eieren and klappers in thanks.
The doerians and the family on Ambon
The joke of Thijs’s life was the doerian. He “sloeg alles wat op dat gebied er was. Hij werd er finaal misselijk van,” walked with a handkerchief before his nose, and almost vomited at the smell of doerians. “En hij had op Ambon een grote doeriantuin, die hem nog een aardig centje opleverde!” The book frames this as one of the deepest jokes of the colonial Ambonese soldier: the man who couldn’t bear the smell of the fruit owned a plantation of the trees that bore it.
His nephew Pietje de Fretes was a fourier, later onderluitenant, with whom he served at Bakongan. “Maar helaas hebben later de Jappen ook deze aardige, vlotte en flinke vent onthoofd” — the Japanese occupation cost him his nephew.
The schietbaan and the natural shot
Thijs’s skill was entirely in the field. On the schietbaan he was unreliable. He is the book’s example of the natural shot — a type Dames pairs with Tanamal and Taris — who can hit a moving target at any distance but cannot reliably hit a still one. The point is not that such men are bad marksmen but that the annual A-klas schietproef was a poor measure of what they could actually do.
Significance
Thijs de Fretes is one of the three named Ambonese soldiers — with Nussy and Tamaela — whose lives Dames draws at length. He stands for the woudloper tradition of the old Marechaussee: the man who knew the rimboe and its dieren as well as he knew the kampong, who was promoted by combat rather than by school, and whose Dutch was the unvarnished idiom of “de kompenie.” His nephew’s beheading by the Japanese also quietly sets up one of the book’s larger arguments: that the colonial army’s Ambonese families paid, in the Japanese occupation and the 1945-1949 revolution, a price that the Netherlands would not, in the end, choose to remember.
See Also
- Nussy
- Tamaela
- Tanamal
- Pietje de Fretes
- 6e Divisie Marechaussee
- Bakongan
- Troemon
- Ië Itam
- Ië Merah
- Boerong kleuëng
- Karabijn (M. 95)
- Korps Marechaussee van Atjeh en Onderhorigen
Source
Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L., by G. W. T. Dames, Maj. Inf. K.N.I.L. b.d. (‘s-Gravenhage: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1954), chapter “Thijs.”
Thijs de Fretes was an Ambonese sergeant 1e klasse of the K.N.I.L. who commanded the 1st brigade of the 6e Divisie Marechaussee at Bakongan in the dertiger jaren and is the protagonist of the chapter “Thijs” in Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L. — a woudloper, jager and buitengewoon schutter whose promotions came “op grond van zijn voor de vijand gebleken geschiktheid” rather than through the kaderschool, and whose plain-spoken Dutch (learned “in de kompenie”) and uncanny marksmanship in the rimboe made him one of the book’s set-piece portraits of Oom Ambon. After retirement he returned to Ambon and was still alive after the Second World War; his later fate is, in Dames’s word, “een groot vraagteken zonder een grafkruis.”
Promotion without the kaderschool
“Thijs was commandant van de le Brigade van de 6e Divisie Marechaussee, sergeant le klasse dus, maar de kaderschool had hij nimmer bezocht.” His promotions came entirely from what he had shown in front of the enemy. He could read, write and speak Dutch, but had learned the language “in de kompenie” — vloeken, spreken, lezen, schrijven — and his Dutch, when the new dokter’s wife at Bakongan asked him how the patrol had been, came out as: “„O, verdomd best Mevrouw, alleen dat verdomde, stinkende rotwater daar, dat is toch zo beroerd, ziet U!"" — which the Mevrouw “zich echt goed moest houden” before laughing it off later with the luitenants. The author observes that one had to have spent days in the Troemonse moerassen at Ië Itam and Ië Merah to understand the remark.
The jager in the rimboe
Thijs was a great woudloper, jager and buitengewoon schutter. The author lists a sequence of feats. He shot a tiger off a comrade’s body with a 6.5 mm karabijn through the brain — “dat schot moest zuiver in de hersens zitten, want het kaliber is eigenlijk te licht voor de grote jacht.” He crept alone into the middle of a kudde olifanten, set his karabijn “achter tegen het oor van het mannetje met de mooiste tanden” and shot it for its ivory. When the zelfbestuurder van Troemon reported a solitair (rogue elephant) that was dangerous to the bevolking to the visiting kolonel in 1933, Thijs promised the kolonel its tanden before the beast was shot — and shot it at five metres’ distance. He shot a boerong kleuëng (a kind of kiekendief) at fifty metres’ height with one shot, after the kampong had asked him to deal with a bird that had been stealing their kippen- en eendenkuikens for months; the kampong presented two kippen, a tiental eieren and klappers in thanks.
The doerians and the family on Ambon
The joke of Thijs’s life was the doerian. He “sloeg alles wat op dat gebied er was. Hij werd er finaal misselijk van,” walked with a handkerchief before his nose, and almost vomited at the smell of doerians. “En hij had op Ambon een grote doeriantuin, die hem nog een aardig centje opleverde!” The book frames this as one of the deepest jokes of the colonial Ambonese soldier: the man who couldn’t bear the smell of the fruit owned a plantation of the trees that bore it.
His nephew Pietje de Fretes was a fourier, later onderluitenant, with whom he served at Bakongan. “Maar helaas hebben later de Jappen ook deze aardige, vlotte en flinke vent onthoofd” — the Japanese occupation cost him his nephew.
The schietbaan and the natural shot
Thijs’s skill was entirely in the field. On the schietbaan he was unreliable. He is the book’s example of the natural shot — a type Dames pairs with Tanamal and Taris — who can hit a moving target at any distance but cannot reliably hit a still one. The point is not that such men are bad marksmen but that the annual A-klas schietproef was a poor measure of what they could actually do.
Significance
Thijs de Fretes is one of the three named Ambonese soldiers — with Nussy and Tamaela — whose lives Dames draws at length. He stands for the woudloper tradition of the old Marechaussee: the man who knew the rimboe and its dieren as well as he knew the kampong, who was promoted by combat rather than by school, and whose Dutch was the unvarnished idiom of “de kompenie.” His nephew’s beheading by the Japanese also quietly sets up one of the book’s larger arguments: that the colonial army’s Ambonese families paid, in the Japanese occupation and the 1945-1949 revolution, a price that the Netherlands would not, in the end, choose to remember.
See Also
- Nussy
- Tamaela
- Tanamal
- Pietje de Fretes
- 6e Divisie Marechaussee
- Bakongan
- Troemon
- Ië Itam
- Ië Merah
- Boerong kleuëng
- Karabijn (M. 95)
- Korps Marechaussee van Atjeh en Onderhorigen
Source
Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L., by G. W. T. Dames, Maj. Inf. K.N.I.L. b.d. (‘s-Gravenhage: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1954), chapter “Thijs.”