by Pat Shipman
Early in 1892 the Vissers packed M’Greet off to a boarding school in Leiden where all the newest educational innovations were being taught to young women wanting to become kindergarten instructors. The school later became famous for the “Leiden kindergarten method” of encouraging children’s natural love of learning through play and practical exercises rather than attempting to make them sit down and listen to lectures. In all probability, the real reason the Vissers sent M’Greet there was that they found her trying to live with and they knew the headmaster, Wybrandus Haanstra. Haanstra had earned his teaching credentials in Sneek, where his father was a pastor and a teacher. The Vissers may have felt more at ease passing the responsibility for this awkward poor relation of theirs to a well-thought-of fellow Frieslander.
When M’Greet arrived at the Leiden school, Haanstra had been headmaster for ten years. He was a very well respected educator and apparently liked by the students. There is now a plaque on the school wall dedicated to him by his “grateful students.” It shows a bas-relief of Haanstra with a walruslike moustache and a full head of hair; his profile vaguely resembles that of Albert Einstein.
Although the then-radical approach of teaching children through play might have appealed to M’Greet’s sense of fun and spontaneity, it is difficult to envision a career less appropriate for her character. She never in her life exhibited any particular fondness for children or any nurturing instincts. In the assessment of one of her former school friends, choosing such a career for M’Greet was an obvious error: “Such a job was good for a ‘motherly’ girl, and M’Greet was a personality.” This appraisal must be weighed carefully, for it was made long after the fact, but the sentiment rings true. As both child and woman, Margaretha Zelle was rarely concerned with anyone but herself.
The oft-repeated story of M’Greet’s brief stay at the Leiden school is that Haanstra fell in love and had a sexual relationship with her. She was sixteen; he was fifty-one and married. She was clever academically and, judging from later reports of her life, exceedingly charming and attractive. She had learned very early that pleasing men was the way to find happiness.
In 1893 she was sent home from the school in shame, while Haanstra remained in his position of power and esteem until his death in 1925. Whatever happened, M’Greet was blamed for the scandal, not Haanstra. Today his behavior would be considered criminal sexual exploitation of a minor. He was a mature man in a position of authority over children; she was a girl who had been placed in his care. But in 1893 she was considered the one without morals and was disgraced.
The Vissers did not take M’Greet back. They were probably deeply embarrassed; M’Greet had proved herself to be her father’s scandalous daughter. Everyone in Sneek would know of this wild young woman’s dishonor. If they were unwilling to try to reform M’Greet further, who could blame them?
It is impossible to verify the story of M’Greet’s love affair with Wybrandus Haanstra. In January of 2005 a representative of the school, now known as the Haanstraschool, confirmed that Margaretha Zelle was on their list of former students. The school itself has no further information, not even archives that might shed light on her classes, grades, or reason for dismissal. The General Leiden Archive (Gemeente Archief Leiden) holds three linear meters of material from the Association for the Professional Training of Female Nursery School Teachers (Vereniging tot opleiding van bewaarschoolhouderessen) for the period 1867 to 1972, looked after by archivist Michiel van Halem. Mysteriously, there are no documents from the Haanstraschool for the period 1890–1900, the decade that includes M’Greet’s attendance there. Were these documents deliberately lost or withheld because there was something in them that someone wished to conceal? Or is their lack of preservation another one of the odd twists of fate that haunt the story of the life of Mata Hari? There is no way to be certain.
After she left Leiden, M’Greet was shuffled off to yet another set of relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Taconis, in The Hague. She was seventeen, without family or prospects and with little to do. But The Hague was not as boring as small-town Friesland; it was the seat of the Parliament and boasted many chic shops and magnificent buildings. With its broad, tree-lined avenues, it had a much more cosmopolitan air than Leeuwarden. The scenic dunes and popular promenade at Scheveningen were enticingly near. The Hague was full of people returned from the Dutch colonies, who clustered together close to the Ministry of the Colonies. Their homes, their speech, and their possessions often recalled the tempo doeloe, the golden past when they lived like kings in the Dutch East Indies or Suriname. Above all, The Hague was full of colonial soldiers on leave.
Margaretha was young and restless and longing for romance and excitement. If she were to create in her mind a man who would restore her tempo doeloe, he would be an older man, a handsome man in uniform, like her father on his horse in the painting that hung in their home on Groote Kerkstraat in Leeuwarden. He would be a man who would treat her like a princess, a precious creature to be spoiled and indulged and petted.
Was she consciously looking for such a man? Almost certainly; girls of seventeen and eighteen with too much time on their hands often daydream about handsome lovers. A town full of young soldiers on leave in their best uniforms was a rich background for such fantasies. Did she realize she was seeking to re-create her father’s magical love during her childhood? Probably not. But an adored and adoring father who disappears, as Adam Zelle did, can leave his daughter with a nearly insatiable longing for male attention.
The pity is that she found the man she sought.
2
Different Lives
WHEN M’GREET MET THE MAN she was to marry, he had spent as many years in the Dutch East Indies as she had lived on earth: seventeen. Their experiences during those seventeen years were utterly different.
Rudolf MacLeod was a hard man—hard-living and hard-drinking, sure of himself, and used to command. He was born into a proud Scottish family that had lived for generations in the Netherlands and produced several military officers. His father was a retired Dutch infantry captain; his uncle had reached the rank of general and been an adjutant to King Willem III. His mother, Dina Louisa, Baroness Sweerts de Landas, had been born into an impeccably aristocratic family that, sadly, had lost most of its fortune.
Rudolf was born March 1, 1856, which made him a full twenty years older than M’Greet. Following the family tradition, he entered a military academy, or battalion d’instruction, at Kampen in the Netherlands on August 15, 1872, when he was sixteen. He wanted to become an infantry officer and was an excellent cadet. In his first year, he was promoted twice: to brevet corporal and then corporal.
Like other cadets, Rudolf followed the ongoing war in the Atjeh province of the island of Sumatra, part of the Dutch East Indies where the Royal Dutch Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger, or KNIL) played a major role. A man who had graduated at the end of Rudolf’s first year at Kampen, Johannes van Heutsz, won great glory—medals and rapid promotions—for his heroism there. From a distance, and with the optimism of youth, Rudolf saw Atjeh as a promising post. The cadets at Kampen had no more idea than the Dutch government that the Atjeh War would prove to be the bloodiest, most viciously fought colonial war of the era. It lasted for forty long years. At any point in its duration, about one-fifth of the total Indies army forces were fighting in Atjeh. Approximately 7,700 officers and men of the Indies army were killed; an even greater number died of disease aggravated by the fetid tropical conditions, poor food, heavy drinking, and frequenting of brothels. As well as decimating the army, the bitter fighting of the Atjeh War killed between 30,000 and 100,000 Indonesian “rebels,” who viewed themselves as freedom fighters, before it ended in 1903.
Rudolf’s portrait was taken at or near the time of his graduation from Kampen. Picture Collection Halwasse, Central Bureau of Genealogy, The Hague, The Netherlands. Originally published in Herinneringsalbum 1850–1890, copyright 1891, Kampen, The Netherlands.
The war had begun, ostensib
ly, because pirates controlled by Sultan Mahmoud Shah of Atjeh regularly attacked Dutch and British trading ships. More truly, though, the war was about establishing Dutch control over the so-called Outer Districts of the Indonesian islands. Atjeh was a rich province that produced half the world’s supply of pepper, and the sultan, who was believed to rule the province as if it were a nation, had firm religious and trading connections to Persia, India, and beyond. He was entirely too powerful for Dutch liking.
The “glorious war” that the young cadets at Kampen followed in the newspapers was far from glorious on the ground. The initial attack had come in 1873. A force of 3,000 Indies army soldiers had sailed from Batavia—now known as Jakarta—on March 22, intending to land in Atjeh and to take the fortified palace, or kraton, inhabited by the sultan. Neither the government nor General J. H. R. Kohler, the experienced officer in command of the troops, knew two crucial facts that predetermined the war’s long duration and difficulty. First, Atjeh was lush and heavily vegetated, with terrain nearly impossible for marching, moving huge cannon, and transporting heavy wagons full of food, smaller artillery, and ammunition. Second, the sultan was assumed to be the leader of a state but was in fact only a figurehead at the head of a loose coalition of local groups in Atjeh. Thus, even when the army took the kraton and the sultan died, the rebellion did not end.
The Indies army warships had landed in Atjeh on April 8 and had met the guerilla fighters in fierce combat. Their artillery and rifles had proved to be not terribly effective against small bands of fighters armed with razor-sharp klewangs (curved Indonesian swords). The guerillas attacked by stealth out of the tall grass or struck without warning from the dark greenness of the forest. The Indies army had shelled and attacked the mosque and the kraton in Banda Atjeh but could not take either. Eighty Indies soldiers and officers, including General Kohler himself, had been killed outright in the battle. Pushed back, unable to grapple with an elusive foe with a much better knowledge of the terrain and local resources, the Indies troops had retreated under the command of Colonel van Daalen. In addition to the dead, there had been 408 wounded and an unrecorded but very large number of men ill with malaria, syphilis, dysentery, cholera, foot rot, beriberi, and other medical problems. The defeat had been bitter and humiliating for the Dutch, who vowed to return and root out the rebels. The rebels, who felt they were protecting their own territory from an invading force, had been equally determined to rout their enemies.
The second Atjeh expedition had left Batavia in November of 1873. Even before they had landed in Atjeh, Indies army soldiers were dying of cholera in large numbers. The commanding officer, General J. van Swieten, later wrote: “December 6, already 302 sufferers were being nursed, 133 of them died, and 169 were still being treated. In the 24 hours from December 5 to 6, 22 died.” Nonetheless, the invasion had begun on December 9. Indies army soldiers had invaded Atjeh, armed with modern Beaumont rifles, two machine guns—useless under the field conditions—and eighteen pieces of artillery. Their intent was to end the Atjeh War once and for all. With a vast force of more than 8,000 soldiers, supported by 4,300 native servants, convicts, and coolies and 200 women, they had expected to accomplish their goal.
During the late nineteenth century, at least three-quarters of the enlisted men in the Indies army were Indonesian, some of them from other regions or tribes of Sumatra with traditional hostility to the Atjehers. Most of the officers were Dutch or European; they comprised about 20 percent of the total force. Some of the other nationalities in the Indies army included Germans, the odd African, and some Ambonese, natives of the island of Ambon, now part of the Molucca Islands of Indonesia. Both Africans and Ambonese were officially “European” through a bizarre legal quirk.
In the second expedition, the Indies army again had failed to take local conditions into account and had foolishly attacked in the middle of the rainy season. One cannon, a twelve-foot-long behemoth weighing 4,700 kilograms, had been brought all the way from the Netherlands by ship. Almost immediately, it had bogged down in the mud and could not be moved further.
During the rainy season in the Dutch East Indies, about 60 percent of deaths could be attributed to illness rather than fighting, and medical treatment was minimal. J. A. Moor sums up the situation recorded by army medical officers in their diaries and reports:
An expedition in the Outer Districts was primarily a desperate, often futile battle against nature and climate. Officers and men were pushed to their furthest limit, physically and mentally. Everyone who took part fell ill at least once, if not several times, and some remained more or less ill for the duration of the campaign. More of the military were disabled, temporarily or for good, because of the merciless physical conditions during a march or in camp, than because of actual combat.
Fighting against native insurgents in the Dutch East Indies had relied on a scorched-earth policy. The army burned and destroyed everything: crops, kampongs (villages), granaries, and mosques. In 1862, M. van Adringa, a young health officer, described a military expedition in which he had taken part; though he had been in Borneo, the description is equally applicable to the fighting in Atjeh a decade later: “So every day we would get up steam and then halt to destroy everything that belonged to the enemy.” Soon the annihilation did not stop at structures and tangible resources but included native men, women, and children. As the war ground on, the fighting grew more savage.
The kraton in Banda Atjeh had been finally captured on January 24, 1874, but the Atjeh resistance to Dutch rule did not end. The sultan had died—allegedly but improbably of cholera—on the day of capture. Instead of surrendering, as the Dutch had expected, the Atjehers had appointed another sultan and continued their incessant and ruthless raids on the Indies army. The army force had been decimated during the second Atjeh expedition as during the first. The second expedition had officially ended on April 20, 1874. A total of 1,052 men had died (almost 13 percent of the expeditionary force); another 764 were wounded, and an additional 877 had to be evacuated because of illness. Sixty-nine percent of the dead had fallen victim to disease.
The Indies army had settled into the heavily fortified kraton, which soon became known as the Kota Raja—city of the raja or sultan—as their base for a prolonged “pacification” of Atjeh. Their aim was “to remain in Atjeh for ever” in order to establish and secure Dutch sovereignty. The fighting had continued as the army marched inland, trying to root out the rebels. Contemporary photographs preserve scenes of the wholesale slaughter of Indonesian men, women, and children, their bloody bodies lying in twisted disarray in ruined kampongs. Even hardened officers sometimes had to turn away from what they and their men had done.
A letter from a young second lieutenant in the Atjeh War, Hendrikus Colijn, who later became prime minister of the Netherlands, showed graphically what the fighting was like:
I have seen a mother carrying a child of about 6 months old on her left arm, with a long lance in her right hand, who was running in our direction. One of our bullets killed the mother as well as the child. From now on we couldn’t give any mercy, it was over. I did give orders to gather a group of nine women and three children who asked for mercy and they were shot all together. It was not a pleasant job, but doing anything else was impossible. Our soldiers attacked them with pleasure with their bayonets. It was horrible. I will stop reporting now.
No more could be written to send home to a loving wife who could not understand the horrors of bitter battle.
As for the Indies rank-and-file soldier—known by the nickname “Jan Fusilier”—he suffered dreadfully throughout the long Atjeh War. His uniform was wool too thick and warm for the stifling, humid climate; he was required to wear a heavy helmet known as a shako; and he carried weighty weapons and a pack. If he had foot-wear, which the native troops did not until 1908, it deteriorated almost immediately in wet conditions. The food was monotonous and spoiled quickly. Jan Fusilier lived on rice, coffee, dried or salted meat, dried fish, bacon, pepper, and vinega
r, supplemented with bread and tinned potatoes when he was in garrisons. Europeans were issued a tot of gin each morning, and native soldiers were given arak (a local liquor) or watered cognac. Invalids received “fortifying provisions,” which included bouillon, arrowroot, cans of meat and vegetables, tea, and red wine.
After the taking of the Kota Raja, the war continued guerilla-style. As the Indies army marched single file through the rice paddies, fields, and glowering forests, Atjeh warriors picked them off one by one. During battles, the Indies army wounded were routinely abandoned to be retrieved later if they were still alive by the time the native convicts, who served as orderlies to shorten their sentences, got to them. The orderlies put the wounded on tandus—homemade stretchers—and carried them from the front to the medical station. There, young medical officers with an average age of about twenty-seven, and no previous experience of warfare, did what they could. They worked in the open air or in hastily constructed thatched huts, cleaning and bandaging wounds, removing bullets or amputating limbs, and administering opium or quinine if there was any. Field medical stations and even the military hospital that was set up at Kota Raja routinely ran out of these vital medicines.