Kajoe‑leh was a kampong in the interior of Acheh that was occupied by Dutch forces on 5 February 1876. The settlement lay amid extensive sawahs and served as a forward base for further advances toward the Atjeh River.
Kajoe Leh was one of the places named on the gravestones of the Petjoet cemetery at Koeta Radja as a field of honour on which Dutch soldiers had fallen, recorded by P. H. R. Beuming alongside Lambaroe, Kroeng Raba and Aroen in the inscriptions he read there.
Account from H. F. Meijer (1883) — the post besieged of March 1876
Meijer gives Kajoe-Lē its first use as the site of the middle Dutch work on the road of the south-east line, chosen by Major B. E. Mekern on the northeast edge of the kampong of the same name in the days directly after the Atoeh catastrophe and lay at the centre of the blockade: the right half of the 13th Infantry Battalion — 305 bayonets with 2 sections of artillery — was held enclosed there in the first week of March by the enemy’s heavy occupation of Lamrong, Lamsajoeng and Lambaroe; the fortification work had only just begun — not one face was finished — and the whole left half of the 13th battalion lay partly inside, partly in regularly set-up huts of rough materials outside the rampart, protected all around by a heavy abatis. The stay there was unhealthy: the troops suffered much from fever and bowel complaints, and after every rain bivouac and work interior turned into one mud pool flooding the soles. For days its garrison saw every patrol fired on, its road cut; the report of the major was then smuggled out through the enemy by the couriers of 6 March pretending at daylight to cut paddy in the fields outside.
After the storming of Lambaroe the road stood open again, vivres and munition reached it on the day itself, and the battalion lay thereafter as the standing garrison of the completed fort. The ground west of it was so sodden that the march from it to Atoë Noord — before the road was made — forced riders to halt in the mud up to the horse’s belly; and the sawahs before it never dried. Thereafter the post stood, with Lambaroe, at the heart of the daily watch of the south-east line.
See Also
- Atjeh River
- Sawah (rice field)
- General Pel
- Major B. Mekern
- Three-day battle in the Beradin pass (23-25 May 1896)
- Groot-Atjeh
- Schetsen uit den strijd op Groot-Atjeh (1911)
- 1896
Sources
Verslagen der Marine‑Vereeniging III 1889‑1890, pp. 229‑233. 20260707_232246_DLP-55-De_geschiedenis_van_het_Nederlandsche_Korps_Mariniers_van_1665_1945_OCR.txt, pages 138‑141.
Schetsen uit den strijd op Groot-Atjeh, met speciaal vervaardigde kaart en toepasselijke photo’s, bewerkt door P. H. R. Beuming, oud-onderofficier van het Ned.-Indische Leger (Amsterdam, December 1911; uitgegeven ten bate van het te stichten Herstellingsoord voor Rijks-Ambtenaren). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Br N 82-144
Acknowledgement of sources. The material in this article derives from Schetsen uit den strijd op Groot-Atjeh, met speciaal vervaardigde kaart en toepasselijke photo’s, bewerkt door P. H. R. Beuming, oud-onderofficier van het Ned.-Indische Leger (Amsterdam, December 1911). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.