by Pat Shipman
Many of the sick and wounded died of infection, since antibiotics had not yet been invented, and the infections were compounded by poor sanitation, dysentery, and inadequate nutrition. Not only the enlisted men suffered. In the first half of the nineteenth century, only 50 percent of the medical officers survived their first five years. A mere 10 to 15 percent of officers lived long enough to achieve twenty years of service in the Dutch East Indies. Conditions did not improve markedly throughout the nineteenth century. Few of the horrors, hardships, and dangers of the Atjeh War were known to any but the soldiers themselves.
Rudolf graduated from Kampen on July 22, 1877, as a second lieutenant. A photograph taken of him at this time shows a very handsome young man, proud of his uniform with its new badges of rank. He looked at the camera with more than a touch of arrogance and great self-confidence.
After graduation, Rudolf accepted a posting to the Indies and sailed on the packet boat Conrad on November 3, 1877. After a brief stint in Padang, the twenty-one-year-old officer was plunged into the brutal hell of the Atjeh War. For the first time, he came face-to-face with war as it was fought instead of war learned from books in Kampen.
The men he commanded and lived with were either native troops or the roughest sort of Dutchman who had been pressed into service, often while drunk, in Harderwijk in the Netherlands. The colonial recruiting depot there was colloquially known as the sinkhole or sewer of Europe. The men recruited in Harderwijk were rarely better than the place. Jan Fusilier was crude, ill educated, often drunken, and an incurable gambler. Yet if properly led, he was a ferocious and loyal warrior. Discipline was harsh and immediate. Officers did not show fear or indecision lest they lose the respect of their men.
Rudolf soon learned to dispense orders without hesitation, to react immediately to the terrifying warning “Orang Atjeh datang!” (The Atjehers are coming!) and never, ever to flinch. He did as he was told and badgered, bullied, and inspired his men into doing as he told them.
Soon after arriving, Rudolf fought at Samalanga, one of the bloodiest and most notorious battles of the war. The rebels were holed up in a native fort, or benteng, surrounded by earthworks and bamboo palisades and too strongly held to be taken. The Indies troops retreated and then returned with more men and cannon. What they did not know was that the benteng was connected by underground tunnels to a second fort, from which more rebel troops had been funneled in. It was a sharp defeat for the Dutch, killing about 30 Indies soldiers and wounding another 150.
The commanding officer, General Karel van der Heyden, was wounded twice during the battle, once by a bullet that grazed his forehead and again by a bullet that entered his left eye. As soon as his wounds were bandaged, he returned to the front line to lead his men. Van der Heyden’s act of raw heroism was commemorated in a famous painting now on display in the Bronbeek Museum in Arnhem, the Netherlands, which houses both a museum devoted to the Indies and an old soldiers’ home.
Van der Heyden was a brilliant soldier but an inflexible man. An observer described the way he left those around him
stunned by the rapidity of his decisions and his incredible energy. The General does not recognize any obstacles, he said to me, he knows nothing but to advance. The officers who can be checked [delayed] do not last long in his army. It can be seen when he is stopped because an order was not carried out, about which he was not informed at the time: then he is terrible! Otherwise, he is full of heart, he loves his men, and also loves those who are in fear of him. One sees large tears roll down his cheeks when he visits the hospital, which he frequents, and where the wounded or ill soldiers call him familiarly and ask him to come to their bedside.
Rudolf fought in Atjeh for seven long years, until 1884. He earned the Atjeh expeditionary cross for military actions between 1873 and 1880 and was promoted to first lieutenant at the end of 1881. His career was going well.
In the early 1880s, Rudolf was one of the officers engaged in trying to eliminate the enemy from a zone surrounding the Kota Raja. After a certain rough control had been established by 1882, a strategy known as the “concentrated line” was put into effect in Atjeh. Kota Raja would be encircled by a series of sixteen forts, linked by good roads or tramlines, thus demarcating a zone that the Indies army hoped to control. First the roads had had to be constructed and the forts had had to be built, miserable labor that was carried out in the stifling heat, with the fear of guerilla attacks.
Eventually more than 5,059 square kilometers were encircled, but eradicating native resistance within the circle was very difficult. Small mobile units consisting of one or two officers and fifteen to seventeen men were sent out on patrol for two to four weeks at a time with orders to search out and kill rebel forces. These patrols carried all their supplies with them from the garrison. If tropical diseases and rancid food didn’t kill them, they were often picked off by invisible attackers. It was grueling and disheartening work.
Rudolf was transferred out of Atjeh in 1884 and sent to Magelang in Java and then to Banjermassan in Borneo, where he spent five years. His career then became choppy and uncertain, with many transfers and no promotions. For reasons unexplained in his military records, in 1889 he was transferred from one battalion to another on May 4 and promptly transferred to yet another battalion on May 23. These were the first two of four rapid transfers within the space of a year. In May 1890 he received two years’ leave of absence to return to Europe, but his leave was retracted “by request” a little over a month later. Why? Did he suddenly recover—or did he hope for a more congenial posting? A mere nine days after the retraction he was transferred again to become adjutant to yet another battalion. That posting proved no more suitable, because he was transferred again two months later, on August 26.
This record suggests that he made himself unwelcome rather quickly at each posting. He stayed nowhere very long and was not promoted, in contrast to his marked successes during his first six years in the Dutch East Indies. Something was blocking Rudolf’s advancement, quite possibly something of his own doing. He admitted freely to drinking, gambling, and going with women. Was he living so wild a life that his superiors thought him unsuitable for further promotion? Was he too harsh on his men, or not harsh enough? For seven years, Rudolf’s career stagnated.
In 1890 Rudolf returned to action in Atjeh and then his record changed for the better. During his second year back in Atjeh, he was promoted to captain (April 7, 1892); on December 9 he was awarded the Officer’s Cross, a medal for long patriotic service. Against considerable odds, he had survived twenty years of service since his cadet days, much of it in vicious combat. He always claimed he had deserved a Willem’s Cross but that his superiors had “finagled” not to give it to him.
Rudolf’s situation in 1892 was vastly different from M’Greet’s. By 1892, her father had declared bankruptcy, her parents had separated and then divorced scandalously, and her mother had died. She had been shuffled off to reluctant relatives. At the time of Rudolf’s promotion to captain, M’Greet was at the teacher training school in Leiden, seducing or being seduced by Heer Haanstra. She longed to experience life, to have romances and adventures; Rudolf had seen too much of the dark side of life and had had altogether too many adventures to indulge in romantic fantasies at that point.
Yet it would be wrong to assume that Rudolf spent his years in the Indies without female companionship. He coyly asserted to one writer that during his bachelor years in the Dutch East Indies he had never gone with native women but that he had loved women often and very much. Rudolf almost certainly had not had affairs with “Pures,” or full-blooded European women, because they were in very short supply in the Indies before 1900. Women comprised less than 20 percent of the European-born population in the entire Indies. The sex ratio among Europeans was even less favorable to romance in Sumatra, where Rudolf was posted most of the time. Between 1877 and 1883, women comprised only about 14 percent of the European-born population in Sumatra, and during his second posting there in
1890–1893, the percentage of European women was still only about 26 percent. The odds of finding an attractive and unmarried European woman to woo were very long. Romancing married ones almost always led to great trouble.
If Rudolf followed the normal pattern for Indies officers, he took a mistress of Indonesian or mixed Indonesian-Dutch ancestry, a population known as mestizos, métis, “half-castes,” or most commonly Indisches or Indos. Until 1895, nearly half of the soldiers in the Indies—most of whom were officers—lived with Javanese or Indo concubines. Those without concubines were almost invariably enlisted men who found the salary too low to support even a native “wife.” For officers like Rudolf, a mistress was an officially acknowledged privilege of rank.
The Indies army had many official regulations pertaining to long-term concubines and prostitutes. Prostitution and concubinage were regarded by the military as necessary evils and, in some circumstances, conveniences. This official stance had an enormous effect on Indies society in general because, until 1895, most of the male Europeans in the Dutch East Indies were in the military.
The army had formally recognized the right of a soldier to have a native or half-caste mistress, known as a nyai or muntji, in 1836. By 1872, military regulations permitted formal, legal marriage for officers or noncommissioned officers (NCOs) but only with permission; marriage was absolutely prohibited for men below the rank of sergeant major. Yet sexual activity was considered necessary for a man’s health, since the government was convinced that the hot climate and spicy food of the Indies increased a man’s libido. Prostitutes living in the barracks were common. The military was not opposed to the practice of concubinage, for their statistics showed that fewer men who cohabited with nyais were infected with venereal diseases (0.7 percent) compared with men who went with prostitutes (6.64 percent). Similarly, men who cohabited with nyais were more rarely punished for drunkenness (14.4 percent) versus those who frequented prostitutes (40.9 percent).
One government official wrote: “The moral standards of the soldier can be so elevated that his conduct is excellent and he refrains from drink. Yet no matter what height he may attain the woman remains indispensable to him, and thus the degree of abstinence is more a question of natural inclination and financial circumstances than moral standards.”
“Unnatural vice,” or homosexuality, was feared by the government more greatly than use of prostitutes, the infection of soldiers with venereal disease, or the birth of children out of wedlock, so there were army brothels. The belief was that the girls in military brothels were less likely to have syphilis than prostitutes elsewhere. They ranged in age from about twelve to perhaps thirty-five or forty. The youthfulness of the concubines is not so shocking in light of the age of legitimate marriage in the Indies, which was fourteen or fifteen. At the end of the nineteenth century, a single visit to the brothel cost Jan Fusilier more than one quarter of the pay he received every five days.
European NCOs whose salaries were higher than enlisted men’s might set up a regular relationship with an Indo concubine, who then lived in the barracks with him in a sort of marriage. Theoretically a European NCO might be given permission to marry, but this was very uncommon. To get some privacy within the barracks, both European lower ranks and native soldiers with concubines created “rooms” by hanging cloths on cord or wire to separate their bed from the others. In 1888, only a little more than 1 percent of the European soldiers (mostly officers) in the Indies army were married.
A soldier normally handed over at least half of his pay packet and his rations to his woman, who somehow managed to produce better and tastier meals than the canteen. This was so usual that setting up “women’s sheds” where the wives and concubines cooked for their men was a priority when a new camp was built. The children resulting from these relationships generally slept underneath the platform on which the couples’ straw mattress rested. Both concubines and children could eat in the mess halls, and in the later part of the nineteenth century, schools were established on some military bases for the mestizo children fathered by the soldiers. The lower ranks were inspected weekly for signs of venereal disease; their concubines were inspected only when the soldiers showed symptoms. Unfortunately, there was no effective cure for syphilis until 1922, though treatments involving doses of mercury and mercury compounds were routinely given to “cure” syphilis.
As an officer, Rudolf lived in much better quarters than the lower ranks, usually in a small house of his own or in a small house divided down the middle and shared with another bachelor officer. Like Indies planters, civil servants, or merchants who had reached high enough status and income, most Indies officers had a nyai—a term that was politely translated as “housekeeper” but that was understood to include sexual access. A nyai always addressed her man as tuan, a term of respect that translated roughly into “lord” or “master.” For discretion’s sake, an officer did not take his nyai out in public, and she was rarely seen when he was entertaining fellow Europeans at home. As a well-known novel of Dutch colonial life expressed the situation:
For that [discretion] is prescribed by adat [traditional law or custom]. The white tuan may keep a nyai but officially nobody should know about it. That would be too indiscreet and would shock the few white women who are here. For a man’s prestige, too, it is desirable to keep silence on that score; a white man may keep a black [native] servant girl, but strictly speaking ought not to sleep with her in one bed.
Whether she was seen or not, a nyai’s influence on the home was obvious to all in terms of the beauty of its furnishings, the quality of its food, the cleanliness and good repair of her man’s clothing, and the quietness and obedience of the servants. Nyais ran the kitchens in the officers’ quarters at home and received field rations when they accompanied their men on field duty to cook for them, do their laundry, and nurse them.
Having a nyai was considered the most effective way for a European man to learn local languages and customs, to the point that Indo mistresses were known as “walking dictionaries.” Plantation owners openly favored their European employees’ taking nyais. In a well-known fictional treatment of plantation life in Sumatra, a newly arrived Dutchman is urged by his superior: “And now, hurry up; you should learn Malay, even better if you have Javanese too, and there’s no better classroom than the square with the white mosquito net [the bed].”
Some nyais had children by their masters, but other men demanded that their nyais have abortions if they became pregnant. Even a nyai of long standing had no legal rights whatsoever; she could be dismissed at the man’s whim at any time. And if her tuan legally recognized the children of the union, their mother had no further rights to them. The tuan could break with her and keep the children with him, could send them to a boarding school or back to Europe for an education without consulting their mother. When soldiers left the Indies, most simply abandoned their nyais and children to be absorbed back into the kampong. Others tried to provide for their nyais and offspring by turning them over to another soldier, in hopes that he would treat them kindly. A very few men sent or took light-skinned Indo children back to Holland for an education, but their mothers were rarely taken to Europe. Some nyais, considered extraordinarily faithful, waited patiently for their tuans to return from home leave, which was often a year or more in duration.
A nyai’s existence was rarely recorded in official documents unless her tuan legally recognized her child. As Lieutenant Colonel J. I. de Rochemont characterized the situation, “The nyai are numerous and belong to all strata of our Indo-European society. Not only the soldiers in the barracks, but also most of the generals, field and other officers, governors of the territories, residents, senior and other officials, have a nyai if they are not married.”
Thus, though there is no documentary proof that Rudolf took a nyai during his unmarried years in the Dutch East Indies, his situation would be extraordinary if he had not. He was a young and virile officer in the Indies, and he liked women. Since he asserted that he
never touched native women, the overwhelming probability is that his nyai was an Indo woman.
Circumstantial evidence of the influence of a wise nyai can be read into the changing pattern of Rudolf’s career. A long-term nyai might have helped Rudolf achieve rapid promotion and success when he was first in Sumatra between 1877 and 1884 by encouraging him, advising him subtly, keeping him from excessive gambling or drinking, and making his home comfortable. Then in 1884, when he was transferred to Borneo, there was no real possibility of taking his nyai with him there; to insist on doing so would have been unseemly and embarrassing. In Borneo, Rudolf’s career foundered. When he was transferred back to Sumatra for the period 1890–1894, his success resumed, as if he had come once again under the beneficial influence of a good nyai who managed his household well, kept him content and out of trouble. Of course, other explanations can be generated for the changes in his military record and confirming evidence is lacking, but the likelihood remains strong that a man of his tastes and personality performed better with a happy home life.
On January 9, 1894, Rudolf was granted two years’ home leave, with continued employment, “because of illness.” He left the Indies five months later, a little more than three weeks after an official document was issued ensuring his “promotion during leave.” He probably had not delayed his departure waiting for the assurance of promotion but was simply too ill to travel. Similar prolonged periods of in-hospital convalescence in the Indies prior to being sent home are recorded for others. On June 27 he was carried on a stretcher onto the steamship Prinses Marie for the journey home.
Precisely what illness Rudolf suffered from is not recorded in surviving documents. All medical records from the Indies during this period were destroyed in 1900. According to MacLeod family legend, Rudolf suffered from diabetes and rheumatism, but this story may not be accurate.