Longbatah was a kampong series in the XXV Moekims of Groot-Atjeh, on the left bank of the Atjeh River, whose two Dutch posts — Longbatah Zuid and Longbatah-Mesigit — stood in the second line of the Dutch defence; it was also the home of the hostile war leader known as the Imam Longbatah, whose fortification line and redoubt stood for months against the post of Longbatah-Mesigit.
The ground
East of the water channel that ran to the Kroeëng Tandjong lay, during the first Dutch year, a connected line of sixteen small square earth redoubts, joined by trenches and covered by plants of the scrub by which the whole position was hidden — in the middle, 200 metres behind a hundred-metre gap in the line, two high standing square earth redoubts of 30-metre faces with thick earth-and-timber breastworks forming the reduit and containing the roomy, well-built wooden house of the Imam Longbatah on poles. This was the best-fortified hostile position of the south face in 1875–1876. From it the enemy’s specialist sharpshooter — the Dutch knew him only as the Glimmert (“the glint”, for the shining black head covering he wore) — picked off the Dutch sentries on the southeast bastion of Longbatah-Mesigit at irregular hours but always from the same spot, becoming for weeks the terror of the garrison, until the answer to his well-laid trick was grown into an armoured tree-top watch post. From the day that the armoured watch house stood in the great tree, his trick was known: he was seen no more.
The kampong and the posts
The kampong Longbatah lay on the left bank of the Atjeh River near the angle of the second line; the road from Kota Radja to the posts of the south-east line in 1876 reached first the old work at Blang Tjoet, then Longbatah Zuid, then the mesigit in its walk. When, in February 1876, Pel’s troops came round the IX Moekims and pushed the Dutch line forward to Pagar-Ajer, the Imam Longbatah had to give up his strong position against Longbatah-Mesigit, which was then reduced in garrison and disarmed of heavy guns.
Westward, the sawah fields between Longbatah and Mesigit Pagar-Ajer were dry in the second half of 1876, when the road from Kota Radja to the posts of the south-east line — first traced over the sawah by the troops themselves and widened and raised during the year — carried the daily transport wagons.
See Also
Source
Atjeh van 26 December 1875 tot 4 September 1876, door H. F. Meijer (Breda: P. B. Nieuwenhuijs, 1883), chapter I, pp. 17–20, 68.