by Vicki Baum
“Why have they stopped firing, I wonder,” Dekker said. The sudden stillness after the shattering reports made an impression of vacancy.
There was a smell of men and boots, of paraffin lamp-soot and smoke. The dawn-sky grew lighter. “Oh, well— God be with us,” the pastor said as he got up. “God be with us”—that was what was always written on the fly-leaf of his mother’s household account books at home in Enschedé. Enschedé. was far away. “My left foot has gone to sleep,” Schimmelpennick complained. Most of the lanterns were now extinguished, but here and there in the yards fires for cooking had been kindled. Coffee was dished out and the men surged round, a confused mass of gray in the gray light. “Here—I say,” the pastor said as the Javanese servants pushed by to get their officers’ breakfasts. Dekker drank his coffee in silence. His sergeant came to make his report—No. 4 platoon ready to march off. Dekker buckled on his short sword and felt what an important person he was. Half an hour later they were on the march.
The 18th Battalion led with the band. The Dutch soldiers sang. The artillery followed with the howitzers, covered by two companies marching on either side of the road, leaving a cloud of dust in their train. The Ambonese, who followed with the reserve companies, marched without discipline and out of step. They had a sleepy look, although they had no rivals when it came to fighting. Dust settled on blue uniforms, dust coated eyelashes and choked throats. The smell of humanity mingled with the strong sweet smell exhaled from the trees that rose above the walls on both sides of the road. The line of the march to Badung went over Tanguntiti and progress was extremely slow. Here and there a brown face peered over a wall and vanished again in terror as soon as it was seen. Then the flanking companies were ordered to break down the wall to protect the troops against the risk of an ambush. Now and then the native labor corps threw a bomb over the walls into the dense foliage of the palms.
Lieutenant Dekker was riding with the 11th Battalion through Sameta when they had the order to halt—why, they did not know. Although it was not yet nine the heat of the sun was intolerable as soon as they stood still. Time seemed to have come to a stop. Riflefire could be heard a long way in front; then it ceased again. The naval guns still rent the air from time to time. They moved forward again slowly. Dekker still had the unpleasant sensation of being ambushed at any moment. He rode his charger and was quite glad to be on horseback again. Two days of skirmishing and footslogging had blistered his feet and every step was an agony. He suffered from the mosquitoes as well. They fell with avidity on his fair skin and seemed even to inhabit his uniform. The romantic notions he had had of active service when he parted from Brigit were years behind him. He had even ceased to write letters. There was nothing heroic to write about; the dangers he still felt to be lurking on every side were imaginary. There were said to have been seven casualties in the four days, but no one had seen them. The medical detachment and its colored stretcher-bearers ambled along unregarded with the baggage train. Water and rations were the chief topic of conversation. Poker was played in camp just as it was in the casino at Surabaya. An Ambonese in the 3rd Company had attacked a Javanese with a knife and had been flogged. The Javanese was back in the ranks. Dekker now had his doubts whether a second-lieutenant could distinguish himself sufficiently in this campaign to earn promotion.
There were several halts and then the rattle of rifle-fire could be heard ahead. Dekker saw a few half-naked brown bodies lying in the road with their lances beside them. He turned his head away, for it was the first time in his life that he had seen any dead. They marched on; this was the stretcher-bearers’ job. Word came from the staff that the enemy had withdrawn into the puri of Badung and was making a stand there. The orders were to encircle the puri and to attack it from all sides at once. The third and fourth companies of the 11th and two companies of the 20th were detailed to proceed by a side road that led off in a southwesterly direction. Two howitzers and six sharp-shooters accompanied them. For a long time they could still hear the band. Then they were among the sawahs. Dekker once more cursed his horse. The first-lieutenant rode ahead with a captain and they were both smoking. Dekker was surrounded by the steam of the perspiring men. “Have you get a cigarette, sergeant?” he asked, for he had none left of his own. The sergeant produced one from inside his cap. It tasted appalling, as was to be expected.
The naval guns had ceased to fire. “Halt,” came from in front. The sharp-shooters dropped to the ground and loosed off at a party of men with lances who had been seen in a field of rice. Dekker saw with relief that the captain and the lieutenant had dismounted and were leading their horses. He, too, jumped off his horse and gave the reins to the sergeant. He had scarcely been a moment on his feet before they began to cause him renewed agonies. “What are those signals the natives keep on sending?” he asked the sergeant. “I can hear them the whole time.”
“Signals, sir?”
“Yes. Tom-toms or kulkuls, as they call them. Drumming on bamboos.”
The sergeant listened. “That is a bird,” he said with a grin. “I don’t know what it is called.”
They had reached the first house in the town of Badung, when a shell landed not far from them. Trees crashed and the earth flew up behind the walls of one of the houses. For a few minutes they all lay flat and took cover. The sergeant had pulled his young officer down as the shell whistled over their heads. “Blast them!” he cursed. Dekker felt his knees tremble; he had the wind up. The horses broke loose and galloped off in terror.
“That was my first,” Dekker said to excuse himself, as he got on to his feet again with a smile and wiped the soil from his face.
“And one of ours too, sir, damn them,” the sergeant said. “If the marines don’t stop chucking these things about, they’ll kill some of us instead of the enemy.”
But no more came over. Probably the staff had some means of signalling to the warships. All they heard now was the roaring and crackling as the puri collapsed in flames. The smell of burning was almost intolerable when they emerged from a narrow avenue of palms and found a shell-shot wall not far ahead.
The captain summoned his officers and briefly explained the situation with the aid of the map he had torn out of the hand-book. They were on the north side of the puri. A second detachment was advancing from the south. The main body was marching by the main road from Kesiman which led to the main entrance of the puri. The artillery was to take up a position at the cross-roads where the main road to Badung turned off. There they were covered by a smaller puri, Tian Siap or Tain Siap, if the howitzers were called on for a preliminary bombardment. The two companies of the 11th Battalion were to advance to the north wall of the puri and then make contact with the rest of the Battalion. The buglers sounded a signal and were answered from no great distance. The officers gave their platoons the order to march. They could not see very much now, although the sun had been blazing away out among the rice-fields.
A ditch separated the road they were on from the wall of the puri. Clouds of smoke drifted over them and obscured their view. On the right, the road was fringed with trees behind which walls and dwellings lay concealed. The ground was soft and covered with grass.
There was not a sound to be heard behind the wall of the puri except the crackling of flames and the crash of falling roofs. It might, for all they could tell, have been utterly deserted. Perhaps its inmates had all fled, or perhaps they lay in hiding, ready to rush out and massacre the Dutch soldiers. It gave Dekker an eerie feeling. His men, too, had become silent; they marched on along the wall in a chastened mood and as noiselessly as their heavy boots allowed. The only sound was the bugle calls. They approached nearer and nearer to the answering bugle without seeing anything of their own men. Suddenly a puff of wind blew the smoke aside and the tops of the palms stirred. Their way on was barred by a wairingin tree over whose roots the men had to go in single file.
They reached the end of the wall and turned the corner. Now they were on the west side of the puri, in the mid
dle of which, as Dekker knew well from his frequent study of the map, was the main entrance. Soon he saw the lofty gateway. Here the main road made a clearing and the sun could be seen in spite of the smoke. The shadows of the palms were black and sharp on the bare ground. Dekker took hold of his field-glasses, and so did the captain. The bend in the road from which they expected to see the main body approaching could not be more than a kilometre away to the north. There was nothing to be seen; the silence that greeted them was incomprehensible and shook the young lieutenant’s nerves.
Suddenly there was the report of a gun inside the walls of the puri, immediately followed by a second. “Company—halt!” the captain shouted. “Company—halt!” Dekker repeated in a trembling voice.
He gave a look at his men. His ear-drums were still throbbing. No one was wounded. The smell of powder smarted in his nostrils.
The troops ahead of them had halted. And now the Dutch howitzers replied from Tian Siap. It’s begun at last, Dekker said to himself.
It was then that people were seen emerging on to the top of the steep steps leading down from the gateway of the puri to the road below. They were clothed in white and adorned with flowers. Their tread was sedate and they had lances in their hands. Behind them were bearers carrying a man shoulder-high on a decorated throne. They set the throne down. For a moment the man was quite alone on the topmost step. Then a procession of other men came out one after another and ranged themselves behind the solitary figure. Dekker let go of his sword-hilt. He could not understand what it all meant. It looked like a scene on the stage. Yes, that was it—it was exactly like a scene at the opera in Amsterdam, to which he had been occasionally. The men were dressed up and they moved with slow and measured steps, just as though they had no idea that the Dutch faced them with guns and rifles and sharp-shooters, and that their palace was surrounded and that a war was on. The man who all this while stood alone and parted from the rest—the raja, he heard the Javanese soldiers mutter—raised his clasped hands to his brow and he stood thus for several minutes. There was still the same air of complete unreality about it. It’s not possible, Dekker thought; people don’t do that, dress like that and behave that like unless they are opera singers. Yet a very real force emanated from the lord’s attitude of tense concentration. The men on the steps before and behind him stood as motionless as bronze statues and the Dutch soldiers did not move either.
Suddenly the lord raised his head and in a flash he had drawn the kris from the scabbard that projected behind his shoulders. He held it outstretched above his head and it flashed in the sun. An unearthly shout broke from the men around him. The next moment they charged the Dutch, kris in hand.
“Fire!” the captain shouted. “Fire!” Dekker roared in his unpractised voice of command. The men fired. A few of the Balinese fell and lay where they had fallen. The rest charged up the main road towards the turning from Tian Siap where the howitzers were firing and the bugles blared. The two companies of the 11th followed at the double. The whole scene was wrapped in the smoke and dust that hung like a curtain between them and the wild rush of the white-clad figures and almost hid it from sight. Dekker ran in front of his men between the shell-shot walls on either side of the road. A party of men armed with spears dashed out of one of the doorways. Dekker was surprised to find that he had drawn his short sword. A bayonet flashed past him into the stomach of a Balinese. When he looked about him he found that he was separated from his company. It looked as though the Dutch would give way before the mad assault of the Balinese. Dekker shouted a command. He saw one of his men fall and noted the astonishment in his face. The other officers, too, were shouting to their men and they re-formed their ranks. And now they had joined up with the main body.
Gunand rifle-fire swept the Balinese as they came round the Tian Siap turning and charged straight for the Dutch troops. The lord was the first to fall. The rest ran on over his dead body in a wild onset and when they fell, still more came on. A mountain of wounded and dead was piled up between the puri and the Dutch troops. Meanwhile the gateway disgorged more and more of them, all with krisses in their hands, all with the same death-frenzy in their eyes, all decked out and crowned with gold and flowers.
Three times the Dutch ceased fire, as though to wake these frantic people from their trance or to spare and save them. But the Balinese were set on death. Nothing in the world could have arrested them in their death-race, neither the howitzers nor the unerring aim of the sharp-shooters, nor the sudden stillness when the firing ceased. Hundreds fell to the enemy’s rifles, hundreds more raised their krisses high and plunged them into their breasts, plunging them in above the collar-bone so that the point should reach the heart in the ancient, holy way. Behind the men came the women and children, boys and girls with flowers in their hair, mothers with infants in arms and old slaves with white hair and girlish breasts. They were all decked out with flowers whose scent mingled with the smell of powder and the sickly odor of blood and death that soon filled the air.
Here and there, priests were to be seen among them, going calmly to and fro among the dying, and sprinkling holy water on their quivering bodies. The raja’s wives had gold crowns on their heads, on which flowers of gold nodded and their hands and arms were loaded with jewels, which they tore off and threw to the soldiers with a look of contempt in their large, unconscious eyes. Some Javanese and Ambonese left the ranks to seize the jewels, but were hounded back by their corporals. Some of the officers turned their heads aside or put their hands over their eyes. Dekker, for one, was unable to endure the sight of men killing their wives and then themselves, and of mothers driving a kris into their infants’ breasts. He turned away and vomited.
Soon the whole road was filled with the dead and dying and the front ranks of the Dutch soldiers were faced by the frenzied Balinese. It was only a man here and there among these white-robed natives who actually attacked kris in hand, but it was done with such a furious lust to kill that the soldiers gave way before the onslaught. The sharp-shooters picked them off one by one, after coolly taking aim. And still the puri disgorged fresh victims, who streamed out as a river from a sluice.
Farther to the west the puri of Pametjutan went up in flames. When a detachment was sent there, another procession came out to meet them. The old lord was carried out on a chair borne shoulderhigh. He was dressed in white like the rest, and his bloodless face was white, too. His dignitaries and officials and servants followed, many of them as old as their master. Lancers went in front and some women and many children followed behind. When his chair was set down he stood erect for a moment while his men charged the Dutch, kris in hand. Fire was opened on them and the old lord fell; soon he was covered by those of his following who were shot or who died by their own hands. The bugles sounded and the companies turned about and returned to the main road at the double. The slaughter there was not yet at an end, although the ground was covered with the fallen. There was still a remnant pressing on between the white soldiers and the brown Balinese, determined to follow their lord to heaven.
Dekker forced himself to look. He saw a woman snatch a kris from a boy’s hand, stab her infant to the heart and then herself. A man stepped over her body; he was a little old man of almost comic appearance and he was brandishing a large kris in the act of killing the boy. Dekker drew his revolver and fired at the old man. He scarcely knew what he did, but he wanted to save the boy’s life. He was a beautiful child, slender, large-eyed and he smiled all the time.
When the little old man fell the boy took the kris and killed him with it, for Dekker’s revolver-shot had only wounded him. Dekker’s hands and lips trembled. “Such things don’t happen, it’s not possible, it can’t be,” he muttered. He felt ill and the sight of the death of the old lord of Pametjutan had made him vomit a second time. The boy withdrew the kris from the breast of the little old man, who still seemed to be laughing. Dekker saw it with the clearness with which things are sometimes seen in dreams, everything was sharply outlined in bl
ack with a curious greenish edge. Blood ran from the kris in the boy’s hand. As he raised it Dekker rushed forward among the falling Balinese, between bullet and kris, to save the boy’s life. He closed with him and tried to wrest the kris from his grasp, but the slender youth had an unexpected and unbelievable strength. He defended himself and brought the kris down on Dekker’s shoulder. Dekker tightened his grip on his revolver and shot the boy in the hand. But he had already turned the kris on himself and fell limp and bleeding on Dekker’s breast. “Serves you right,” Dekker said, overcome by rage and pity at the same time. He opened his eyes and found the boy’s unconscious body in his arms. Again he felt ill, his stomach heaved, everything heaved, the green edge on things vanished, everything went black and he knew no more.
When he came to himself without knowing how long he had been unconscious he felt himself swaying in a measured swing. At first he thought he must be in the Van Swoll again, but then someone bent over him and said, “Well, that’s a fine way to behave.”
He was on a stretcher with a stretcher-bearer behind and before, whose tread gently swayed him to and fro. There was a smell of powder and battle. He was familiar with it by now. His left shoulder hurt him and his tunic stuck to it. When he turned his head to see what was going on he found that there was another stretcher being carried close beside his. It was the boy for whose sake he had plunged into the mêlée. Apparently they had reached the dressing station, for the stretchers were put down in the shadow of some bread-fruit trees and the boy was laid on the grass beside him. It was a strange feeling to have the warm, living body of his little enemy so close to his own. The boy sat up cross-legged and let his head sink on his chest; probably he felt dizzy, as Dekker did, too.
“The little heathen is bleeding, the plucky little chap,” Schimmelpennick said pityingly. Dekker looked at the boy. His eyes were shut, but he was smiling. He had slanting eyebrows and a little dimple in his right cheek and an unusually beautiful mouth. There were flowers in his hair, and the smell of flowers about him conflicted with the iodoform of the dressing station.