Stories 
Foreword
He was born 116 years before I was. I did not know him by name, not from photographs, not from stories. But I found his traces in yellowed registers of the KNIL. His son left words behind about him. On Java I found his name again when I held dusty papers that still smelled of the past. And in Gombong, on the grounds of the former military training school, I tried to think away the asphalt, cables and motorbikes. It was well over thirty degrees, and yet I had goosebumps—because for a brief moment I stood side by side with a ghost from the past.
I walked where he walked, slept where he slept, and lived where he lost his life. Through the streets of Surakarta, along the barracks in Gombong, beneath the evening skies of Bali and under the smoke of the Merapi in Yogyakarta, his birthplace. My great-great-grandfather, Anton Herman Gerard Hendrik Thümann, lived in a time when loyalty to authority mattered more than loyalty to one's conscience. But no uniform can silence a heart for ever.
This is not an inventory. This is the story between the lines: not a recitation of facts, but an attempt to listen to what was never written down. To let his world breathe once more—between smoke and rain, between guilt and humanity.
"And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth: blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood." — Joel 2:30–31
Prologue
His will was done
First there was nothing. Only silence. Not the silence of peace, but the taut silence of something hovering at the edge of the underworld. It struck the birds of paradise dumb. Animals took cover. And the water along the coasts of the Sunda Strait lay perfectly still—as if the whole archipelago knew what was coming.
On 27 August 1883, the world burst open. Krakatoa erupted with a force that split the sky. The blast was the loudest ever measured on earth. Within a radius of 64 kilometres, eardrums tore like rice paper. Fishermen who still tried to turn their boats heard nothing more—only a dull thud that turned them inward for ever. A boy on the shore pressed his hands over his ears, but heard only the ringing in his head. "Apa iki, Bu?" he stammered, though he could not even hear himself. The pressure wave raced three and a half times around the earth. The blast was heard 5,000 kilometres away—in Perth, in Madagascar, and on islands no one knew the name of any longer.
Dark grey columns shot kilometres high into the atmosphere. Until the sun could no longer be seen. The rain turned acid. The sea, black. Tsunamis flattened coastlines as if they were woven from reeds. The sky turned copper-red across the globe. The earth's temperature plummeted. And dark ash rained for days on end over the great Sunda islands. Krakatoa was gone—swept away, swallowed by fire and sea, as if the creator could no longer bear his own monster.
But life went on.
On Javanese soil a Dutch-Indies boy took his first steps on earth that bore his colour. His feet touched ground that still trembled. His lungs breathed air heavy with dust. His world coloured red—deep, threatening, glowing red—as if the devil had hung a blanket of fire across the sky. For many it was terrifying, a sign of divine punishment or the end of days. But for him, for him it was his childhood.
He grew up in that red. In that dark glow he found not menace but a way to survive. Hell was home. The world had already torn itself open before he learned to speak. So how could he do otherwise than join himself to those tears? The earth had lost its innocence. And he, a child of the aftermath, would follow that same path.
He would learn to give orders that brooked no contradiction. He would learn to aim at those who refused to bow. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Queen, he would open fire on everything that breathed heathenism. But deep within he felt—at every shot, every scream, every drop of blood—that he was only digging deeper into the crater from which he had once been born. Like an echo of hell—wrapped in human flesh. Was it his choice? Or was this his fate?
The first monsoon
A warm breeze moved the palm trees slowly. The air shimmered with heat; sunlight fell filtered through the leaves. In the distance a gecko called, crickets kept the rhythm. It was a slow but lively afternoon—until dark clouds gathered above the mountains.
Dogs grew restless, birds hastily sought shelter, and the first rumble of the approaching monsoon rain trembled through the warm tropical air. In the distance the contours of the mountains blurred with the coming storm. The garrison of Yogyakarta lay silent beneath the dark bank of cloud.
Within the garrison walls the ticking on the canopy of leaves sounded like an endless marching rhythm—slowly drowned out by the rain that burst loose like a sudden command. Trays of wet glasses trembled on their rims as thunder rolled over the mountains, followed by the shrill neighing of a startled horse in the courtyard. The air carried the whispering of drenched vegetation, and mud splattered up against the crumbling foundations of the barracks.
In a cool room, behind wooden shutters that clattered to the rhythm of the wind, Frederika Mollet gripped the sheets. Her cries cut clean through the noise of the storm—sharp and raw. It was the sound of a woman surrendering to something greater than herself. Her face was drawn tight, her hair plastered to her temples, and her breath was a struggle.
A slight Javanese woman crouched beside the bed. Her hands worked silently and deftly. She was the only midwife within reach—no papers, no title, but knowledge passed down through generations. Her work was paid in guilders, rice or a chicken, depending on what the family could spare. "Ambegané, nduk, ambegané…" she whispered, her voice soft and rhythmic as a prayer.
At the foot of the bed stood the 27-year-old French sergeant Antoine Thumann, motionless, his uniform half undone, drenched with sweat and the humid air. His hands, normally accustomed to discipline and command, trembled slightly. This was no manoeuvre. This was unknown terrain—something for which he had no protocol. His blond hair clung to his forehead. His blue eyes were focused, but shone with something he had long since unlearned in the field: vulnerability.
He looked at her—at her black, wet locks like strands across her shoulders, her skin glistening with exertion, her eyes earth-brown and full of fire. She was young, 18 years old, strong, and was bursting open with something that overwhelmed them both. He, hardened by patrols, battles and years under the tropical sun, stood there now as a man who had no idea how to compose himself before this raw miracle.
Suddenly—between two thunderclaps—came a different sound. High, thin, and unmistakably alive. The first cry of a child. His faint voice mingled with the rain, as if it were being carried by the tropics themselves. For a moment all was still. Even the storm seemed to withdraw. The child, glistening with amniotic fluid and still trembling from the crossing between worlds, struggled weakly, his little fists clenched.
Antoine stepped closer. His gaze on the small, trembling body that seemed to look up at them with closed eyes—innocent, unknowing, untouched by the world into which it had descended.
What was exactly said in that room in Yogyakarta, we do not know. The archives are silent on the matter, and it was never told to us later. But we can imagine how it must have sounded: far too much warmth, too young a woman, and someone who in haste calls upon God.
They would call him Anton Herman Gerard Hendrik. Four names, carefully chosen. Anton—an echo of his father. Herman and Gerard—two comrades from the fourth battalion, with whom Antoine had weathered the storm side by side. And Hendrik—the name of Frederika's father, as a nod to the line that had brought her here.
In the first months the child still bore the name Mollet—his mother's name, the name given to children when love had not yet been signed. Only two months after his birth, when Antoine and Frederika formally married, did he receive his father's name, corrected with an umlaut: Thümann.
And so began, on 13 January 1882, while the monsoon lay like a veil over Yogyakarta, the life of a boy who would remember nothing of the man who gave him his name.
The Merapi near Yogyakarta. Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 1403538)
Imagine it had gone differently. That Antoine had lived longer. That in the evenings he had walked the veranda with Anton on his arm, laughed away the clammy heat, and repeated his name in French like a melody. That he had taught him to walk in the yard, between the papaya trees, his hand firmly in his. That he had called him 'mon petit', or 'min Büe' in his Alsatian dialect. Had told him about the snow, the scent of chestnuts in Erstein. Perhaps he would have recognised in his son something he himself had long since lost—innocence. A gaze without judgement. Someone who did not know him as a soldier, but simply as papa.
They might have shared a language that was half Malay, half French, but entirely their own. Perhaps he would have spoken his given names with pride—all four, every time, like a small blessing. Then Anton would have known how his voice sounded, how his uniform smelled, what it felt like to be held by a father who had wanted him.
But none of that happened.
On 10 June 1882, barely five months after Anton's birth, his father's heart stopped beating—without his ever having heard how it had beaten for him. Nothing remained. No voices. No scents. No hand on his head. No grave where he could later mourn. No family to tell stories. Not even memories. Only a silent absence that he carried with him all his life—a silent absence that sealed his fate.
Between two worlds
Anton was the first Thümann born on Javanese soil. A son of Alsace and a son of Java. Condemned for ever to live between two worlds. A forgotten child of a family on the other side of the world. His grandfather, grandmother, cousins, aunts and uncles in Alsace knew nothing of his existence. They knew his father—as a son, as a brother, as a young man who had once left for the Indies—but not the small boy he had left behind in the East. No letter had announced the birth. No death notice had followed. For them, Anton was an unwritten footnote in a story they would never know.
His father died when Anton was still a bundle of innocence, warm and soft wrapped in cloths. A baby who knew nothing of fathers, of death, of obligation and loss. And yet that loss changed everything.
Frederika, his mother, was barely eighteen and already a widow. Too young to go on alone, but old enough to know she had little choice. Every day after Antoine's death she felt her future shrink, like rice in an ever emptier bowl. She held Anton firmly against her, as if she could protect him from a world that had already long since defeated her. Her second marriage was not a choice born of love, but of necessity. Fear of a future in which a woman without a husband was worth even less than the dust beneath her feet.
On 15 February 1883 she remarried, to Ferdinandus Leopoldus Josephus van den Doren. A Belgian man with order, a pay cheque and a future—everything she needed. Van den Doren was a sergeant-major in the Sultan's bodyguard, a translator at a notary's office, a man of standing. And as part of that new life: Anton.
He belonged, but only as a silent appendage. Like an old trunk that moves to a new house but never finds a fixed place.
The move to Surakarta came quickly. Van den Doren's new position at the court of the Susuhunan offered prestige and stability. For Frederika it meant safety. But for Anton it meant farewell. Away from Yogyakarta, away from the only street that still breathed something of his father.
Surakarta
Surakarta was a city of tradition and ceremonial splendour, where even the wind seemed to bow to the will of the Susuhunan. The gamelan sounded there softer, slower, as if aware of the sacred ground on which it played. Pale palace walls rose like stone commandments, adorned with symbolism Anton did not understand. He walked through the streets like a speck of dust on a marble floor—unseen and unwanted.
Every night the rain pounded on the roof, like a memory that refused to subside. The walls sweated, the windows creaked. Anton grew up between those sounds—silent, cautious, like a weed between stones. He did not belong to the stateliness of the city, not to the bloodlines that passed on rituals from father to son. He was no one's heir. Only of silence.
When his half-sister Adolphine Louise Charlotte van den Doren was born, Anton saw how his stepfather held the baby proudly in his arms. Anton saw the warmth in his gaze, a pride that he himself had never been permitted to feel. Three years later another half-brother arrived: Ferdinand Louis Eduard van den Doren. The house filled with new life and new voices, but within Anton grew an emptiness that took up ever more space.
He grew older. He learned words for things he never received. He grew up in a house where he was not missed—and perhaps never truly arrived. He belonged to the family, but not at its heart. There was no hatred, only a quiet, unnamed distance—a distance that year by year grew more self-evident.
When money became scarce and choices unavoidable, it was Anton who had to leave first—and his mother could do nothing but comply. His stepfather laid his hand briefly on Anton's shoulder, but he felt only the weight, no warmth, no regret. "The KNIL is looking for boys like you, was quietly whispered to him.
Not long afterwards he was collected by a man in uniform, who called his name as if merely working through a list. No questions. No explanations. Only the journey to Gombong. The man did not look at him, but somewhere in his silence lurked a knowing—as if he had already seen what Anton was still to endure. As if he recognised the fate of boys like him. Boys who have nothing to lose.
On the train heading west, palm trees, rice paddies and mountain slopes flashed past the window—green and alive, bathed in sunlight. Butterflies flew low over the rice fields, children played in streams. But inside the carriage Anton sat facing an unknown future. The brighter the landscape outside, the heavier the darkness that settled around him. He did not yet know about the call to obedience, the cold morning roll calls, the punishment marches in the heat. He did not yet know about the lonely nights, the wet blankets, the silence of boys who preferred to feel nothing any more. But the man in uniform knew.
When they finally arrived at the garrison and Anton saw the gate slowly opening before him, it felt as if every piece of his past sank irretrievably away in the mud behind him. Was this truly his fate? Or was it simpler than that: that a colonial army prefers to choose boys with no safety net, because no one will come to the office to complain on their behalf?
Train on a railway bridge near Gombong (±1890). Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 19341)
A child in uniform
The day Anton received his first uniform, rain was falling on the dusty courtyard of the military training school in Gombong. No tropical downpour, no thunderclap, only a soft drizzle that made everything dull and glistening—even the brownish cotton of his sleeve. He held his arm up and rubbed the insignia on his chest as if he wanted to feel the truth of it. Did he finally belong somewhere?
He was only eight when he was brought to Gombong—small in stature, but long accustomed to the feeling of never being truly at home anywhere. His mother had quietly handed him over to a man in uniform, with a handshake from his stepfather that was retracted just a little too quickly. Then the journey, the jolting of the train, the silence of the man opposite him, and the window in which rice paddies glided past like a dream in which he slowly disappeared further and further.
Gombong lay deep in the interior of Central Java. It was a garrison village surrounded by mountains and rice fields. Soldiers drank cheap arak there and squandered their pay on cards, horse races and women whose names no one knew. For a child there was nothing to hold on to—except a sense of duty to the tricolour.
Anton Herman Gerard Hendrik Thümann, entered into the corps register at the age of 8. Source: National Archives The Hague (NL-HaNA_2.10.50_377_0160).
The military training school
The military training school, situated within the fort, was no school like any other. It was a world unto itself—shielded by discipline, ordered by commands, and structured around the rhythm of the day. Early in the morning the bell rang, and the boys had to stand in line. Small boys like himself, beside older boys with sharper jaw lines and calluses on their knuckles. They all wore the same. Ate the same. Spoke in the same tone. And were addressed with the same harshness.
In the dining hall it smelled of spoon grease and crockery. Everything had its order: at six in the morning the pupils received nasi goreng—sixteen deka, no more. With a small tin of coffee, black and bitter, with precisely one teaspoon of sugar permitted. Later, at eleven, came the second breakfast: sticky rice for the older boys, a half portion for the youngest. In the afternoon, on the stroke of quarter past one, the metal plates arrived on the table. Rice, vegetable soup, sambal ulek. A quarter kilo of meat per head—if you ate your plate clean. After sunset, at five past half past six, came the evening meal: rice, sayur, a boiled duck's egg, and serundeng—grated coconut with fried peanuts. The food was no comfort. It was a system. Those who were smaller received less. Those who hesitated lost out. Those who stood out went hungry. Everything was weighed, counted, controlled—even the silence between each spoonful.
During the day there were lessons: arithmetic, military instruction, reading, writing, map-reading, shooting practice, and catechism. The mission had its own lessons. There Anton learned that his mother was a heathen, that her customs were foolish, and that it was his duty to civilise heathendom. He knew the book by heart: "A good soldier serves God, king and flag." He read it with a steady voice, and felt how his child's voice became a little less his own with every repetition.
Pupils of the military training school in Gombong. Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 503755 & 503362)
Even in his free time, hierarchy was the rule. Once a week the local swimming pool was cleaned. The first days were for the European boys. Then the Indo boys were allowed in. And only on the last day—when the water was dull and murky—did the native boys get their turn.
In the evenings, when the lamps burned dimly in the dormitory, the boys lay still in their beds. Sometimes they heard shouting from older pupils outside, or the hoarse voice of a sergeant barking his last commands like curses in the rain.
Anton would lie still then, his blankets pulled tightly over him, his hands folded as if trying to preserve himself. As an Indies boy of the second rank he had learned that it was safer not to exist when no one was calling for you. Your obedience to the Netherlands had to be visible, but your presence preferably not.
In Gombong he learned not to cry. Not when he grazed his knees during drill. Not when he felt sick with the heat at night. And not when letters from home failed to arrive—empty weeks without a word from his mother.
The grief went nowhere; it only grew quieter. In the silence he grew crooked, but strong—not upright as the sergeants wanted him, but bent within himself. Warmth was exchanged for order. Closeness for command. And whoever wanted to feel something had to do so in silence, under the blankets, with their face to the wall.
The barracks where Anton slept 127 years ago and the fort where he attended lessons for 8 years. Both colour photographs were taken on 9 May 2025 by his great-great-grandson Jeffrey Thümann.
Six years after Anton had arrived in Gombong, one morning a new boy was led in—small, with a heavy bag and a timid gaze that seemed to doubt everything. Anton barely noticed him, as he barely noticed most newcomers. Until one of the non-commissioned officers read from the list: "Ferdinand Louis Eduard van den Doren."
The name hung in the air. As if it did not belong to the present, but rose up from an earlier time. Anton knew that name. Or rather: he remembered the sound of it in his mother's voice, long ago, when Ferdinand was still a toddler. Two years old, perhaps. A brown-skinned child with soft cheeks and wooden toys.
Ferdinand was a boy who moved awkwardly, who spoke too carefully. Someone who had no antenna for commands, because he was still too accustomed to voices that called him back. He would ultimately be discharged. Unsuitable. No ceremony. No farewell. Only a name crossed out.
The training school taught them to march before they learned to walk in freedom. Taught them to shoot before they learned to doubt. Everything had a place. Everything had a reason. The chaos of the world was rewritten here in commands. And Anton, who belonged nowhere, now belonged here.
The uniform gave him weight. Not as a boy, but as a function. He polished it every evening with careful precision, his fingers black with grease. He smoothed his sleeves and bent over the still water of the washbasin, as if he wanted to know whether he yet existed. The face that looked back still had baby fat in the cheeks, but the eyes were already older. In his gaze burned something vague—not fierce, not visible to another, but deep red and palpable, like blood under the skin. Not anger. Not pride. Something that had always been there, but now lit up for the first time. Then he stood as he had been taught: feet apart, arms at his sides, still as a statue. A child at attention. A child in service.
"For they have cast their children into the fire... which I did not command, nor did it come into My heart." — Jeremiah 7:31
Entrance of the military training school in Gombong, festively decorated for the 18th birthday of Queen Wilhelmina. This photograph was taken in Anton's final week as a pupil (1898). Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 27570)
In service of the tricolour
Sixteen and a half years old. Oval face. High forehead. Brown eyes. An ordinary nose, an ordinary mouth. Pointed chin. Brown hair, full eyebrows. A pigmentation mark beneath his navel. No scars. Not yet. Only that description, recorded in the register of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army—like thousands of others. As if a boy could be captured in numbers, measurements and skin characteristics. As if one could catalogue a soul.
But behind that description sat a boy who had traded his childhood for commands. He was where he had been trained since the age of eight: following in the footsteps of his father, Antoine Thumann, sergeant. Was this it then? The path? His destiny? If he kept strictly to the rules, kept tightly to the rifle, would it grind less painfully inside? Would discipline shape him into something that made sense? Perhaps the empty, silent gap where a father ought to have been would close of its own accord. Perhaps… if only he stayed silent and obeyed long enough… he would one day feel that he was truly permitted to be there. But for now he felt only the edge of his collar chafing his neck, and the weight of his rifle against his shoulder—cold and rigid. As if it already knew what it was going to demand.
In his pocket was a small booklet: "Assigned to the third depot battalion." A transitional place. Between child and man. Between pupil and soldier. "Transferred to the thirteenth infantry battalion", was added two months later. He was being prepared for the establishment and maintenance of Dutch authority—in effect a merciless, one-sided colonial war. He learned how to build bivouacs in the mud, how to hold bayonets without hesitation—and that the one was permitted to exist, the other not. Thinking was superfluous. Doubting a weakness. Obedience became a virtue. He was formed and moulded, not in his own image, but into a precision instrument of violence—so constructed that he would carry out orders, even when blood was involved.
Borneo, 1901
Anton was nineteen. Not yet a man, but no longer a child either. The innocence that his father had once seen in his eyes at his birth was nowhere to be found. The man in uniform who had collected him from Surakarta eleven years earlier could have foreseen it.
"Garrison battalion of the Southern and Eastern Division of Borneo, his papers stated. No explanation. No clarification. Only a place, a date, an assignment—like the moving of a chess piece, far from the island of his birth.
Rumour had it that the indigenous population of the great Sunda island was growing ever more restless—village chiefs were refusing to collect taxes, reconnaissance troops did not always return. There was talk of "sleeping resistance" in the Dayak lands, and of the importance of a visible presence. The colonial government called it enforcement. For the boys it was mainly a matter of grinding on through impenetrable jungle.
In the government reports it was called "maintaining the Pax Neerlandica": staying visible, showing the flag, collecting taxes, putting out small fires before they became uprisings. It sounds peaceful, almost Roman. In practice it mainly meant that young men like Anton walked endless patrols through territories that had never asked for their presence.
When they finally moored at a half-rotted wooden jetty, he felt it: something began here that was no longer reversible. The camp consisted of barracks on stilts, tin roofs and muddy paths. Everything smelled of moisture and mildew. In the morning you heard the shrieking of monkeys, but in the evening the jungle really came to life—with the drumming of frogs, the scraping rasp of insects, the patter of rats on corrugated iron roofs, and the rustling of something just beyond the reach of his eyes.
He was one of many. A body on loan, with only a rifle, a water bottle, and obedience. They patrolled daily—sometimes because of reports, sometimes as a precaution. "We need to be seen, said a sergeant. "So they know we are not sleeping." So they marched. Through mud and rain. Sometimes they encountered no one. Sometimes only an old woman with a basket of leaves, who cast her eyes down before anyone asked a question. And yet every village was approached as potentially hostile. Every path as a risk. Every shadow as a mistake you could only make once. What exactly they were guarding, no one was entirely sure any more. But the idea of order had to remain visible. Even if only for themselves.
Patrol in the Dayak lands
There were reports of movement at a camp on the eastern edge of the patrol area. A handful of men had been spotted, more often than usual, according to a native informant. No open revolt, not yet, but the situation was tense. "They are building something, said the sergeant, as he sharpened his knife on a stone. "Too much activity. Too many men in one place. We look. And if need be, we clear it out." Just a direction, five names, and the order to be back before sunset. Anton nodded when his name was called.
He prepared his pack. His fingers checked the ammunition as if it were a ritual. He knew the rhythm of patrols, the pace of marching in unpredictable terrain. He also knew what was expected of him if it came to shooting. Not everyone carried a rifle like his. Only he bore the sharpshooter's model with an extended barrel and a finely adjusted sight. He had earned it at the thirteenth battalion, after a practice shot at a hundred metres that brought his commanding officer to silence. Since then he was put on the list for every targeted operation. He would fire the first shot. He, who could slow his breathing until the rifle synchronised with his heartbeat.
KNIL infantry on patrol by canoe on Borneo. Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 94302)
It was still early when they set off. The sun hung low, a dull ball above the misty treetops. The ground was soggy from the night's rain and the air sticky with rising heat. They walked in silence, five men between ferns, mud and rustling. Anton listened to the rhythm of their boots, to the soft slosh of water in his field bottle.
Bridge in Central Borneo. Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 76495)
After hours they reached a slight elevation. On the far side lay a clearing between the trees—unused land, with traces of a campfire, an overturned basket, some latticework, too neatly stacked to be accidental. Something moved. Two men, young, in simple clothing. One was brandishing a machete. The other had a cloth in his hands. They were talking. Perhaps laughing—it was too far away to hear. Anton heard only the beating of his own heart.
He lay down on his stomach in the grass. His sharpshooter's rifle rested steadily on a bundle of leaves. The sight was sharply calibrated. He had learned that one breath could make the difference between the word of a superior and the silence of a dead man. With his eye firmly behind the sight he drew the world towards him. He saw the sweat on the forehead of the man with the machete. The veins in the wood of the post he leant against. The traces of mud on his trouser leg.
Behind him came the whispered command. "If he so much as moves: take him."
No further explanation. Only the ticking of blood in his ears. This was what Anton was. What he could do. What they expected of him. He shifted his weight, slowly, as if the earth itself protested. His elbows found their place in the grass. He corrected his posture. His breath slowed. One… two… standstill.
Across the clearing, the man slowly turned his head. Not because he heard something, but because his instinct felt it—the way you suddenly know that eyes are on you, without anyone saying a word.
Anton closed one eye. He saw the glint of sweat on the man's brown forehead, the rough lines of his face, the frayed edge of the cloth in his hands. The moment stretched out. His finger touched the trigger. And rested there for a moment. One breath. And then—a flash.
The shot was sharp, but distorted by his ears—duller than usual, as if he were underwater. He felt the recoil of the rifle, his shoulder absorbing it, his face pressed taut against the sight. Mud splattered against his cheek. The world seemed to freeze, his gaze narrowed. Everything around him blurred—the leaves, the grass, the shuffling behind him. Only the target remained sharp, hair-sharp, as if his eyes held on a little longer to what his fingers had extinguished.
His heart pounded in his chest, hard and high, like a drum beating out of rhythm. His breath caught. His mouth was dry. Something inside him felt like crystal, brittle and shining, as if for a brief moment he was not made of flesh but of glass. And then—movement. The man fell backwards. No cry and no resistance. Only the body, collapsing like a piece of cloth.
The other man stood still for a moment. Paralysed. The machete slipped from his hands. His eyes wide, his face frozen with incomprehension. And then—without a cry, without direction—his legs took over. As if his body gave the command his head had not yet understood. He turned and ran. Stumbling over roots, diving into ferns, as if the primal instinct dragged him away from the sound of death.
Anton lay still. His finger still on the trigger and his eye still on the sight. But he saw nothing more. Only an empty space where sunlight fell on fallen leaves, as if nothing had happened.
Behind him the sergeant drew closer. One hand on his trembling shoulder. "Neat, he said. But the word did not reach him. There was only the ringing in his ears—high and cutting, like a scream out of the darkness. Everything in him felt dislocated. As if his body still lay here, but his spirit had slipped through a tear that had been opened long ago. He breathed as if his lungs were full of smoke. In his head the echo pounded on. No triumph. No clarity. Only a red glow somewhere deep within.
On the way back barely a word was spoken. The ground was boggy. His boots sucked into it with every step, as if the jungle did not want to let him go. Someone coughed. Another muttered something about the heat. Anton said nothing. His rifle hung low against his hip, heavier than usual, as if it were no longer made solely of steel but of silent guilt.
Back at the bivouac he did what was expected of him. He polished his weapon until it gleamed, as was proper. His fingers moved over the barrel as if it were a prayer—automatic and rhythmic, as if with each rubbing motion he hoped to wipe himself back into a form he still recognised. The smell of oil rose up, familiar and yet now nauseating. In his hand the cloth slid over the sight, over the trigger, over the dried rim of mud still clinging to the barrel—cold, granular, as if the earth itself had been a witness. Everything suddenly felt strangely familiar—as if he were not doing it, but watching himself. As if he had already begun to disappear.
At the edge of the barracks came laughter. Someone was telling a joke: "What is the difference between a headless chicken and a native with a machete?" A voice chuckled: "With the chicken you can still make soup!" The others burst out laughing. A hand slapped the table. Chairs creaked. Life went on, effortlessly, as if killing a man meant no more than removing a stone from the road. As if nothing had happened. As if that man had never existed.
Perhaps he lay awake that night. Eyes open. His breath slow under the mosquito net, which moved with the breathing of the jungle. He did not think of the man's face. Nor of his hands. Perhaps he thought of nothing—and felt everything. As if something sank deep within him: a dark point where no light could reach. An abyss without echo.
Perhaps it was not the shot that changed him, but what followed: that second in which the world did not hit back. That cold stillness in which no one cried out, no one ran, no one said: "Stop." As if the earth swallowed his deed without protest. As if even the sky was silent and thereby—almost casually—said: "It is well." And perhaps he knew then—or only somewhere in his body—that this was only the beginning.
"A time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God." — John 16:2
Bali, 1906–1908
The morning crept barefoot into the village. A mist hung low between the palms. The first light fell silently through the bamboo of the walls. The air smelled of pandan, wet earth and the ash of the fire that still smouldered beneath the rice pots.
Ketut sat on his haunches in the sand, his knees under his chin, the edge of his sarong wet with dew. In his small hands he held a bundle of flowers. He was allowed to count the jasmine—always in sevens, for that brought good fortune. He laid them carefully in the palm leaf that his grandmother held open for him. She nodded with satisfaction, her face deeply lined, her eyes clear as morning dew. "Lembut, Nak, she whispered softly.
Beside them the temple still lay in half-slumber. Only a bird called three times from the banyan tree. In the distance the faint tinkling of a gamelan sounded, as if even the music were still stretching itself. Ketut listened, his head tilted, as if he were trying to make out something not meant for him.
Ketut was eight. He was the fourth child. His older brothers, Wayan and Made, were already in the field. His sister Komang was helping mother wash the cloths at the river. Ketut was allowed to stay to help with the canang sari—the morning offerings. That was his task today. And he was glad to do it. He knew the sequence by heart: first fold the leaf into a small bowl. Then a little rice. Then the flowers—clockwise.
On hearing the birds, his grandmother softly whistled back between her teeth. Her fingers folded and inserted, her breath audible in the rhythm of her work. Ketut followed her movements as if in a dance. Sometimes she whispered old words. Sometimes she was silent.
Between two movements he looked up, at the leaves swaying above his head. Light fell like dancing dust through the green. The wind was gentle. Everything seemed to be listening to something greater than itself.
In his head he counted the steps from their yard to the water: thirty-three. Every morning the same. He knew every stone. Every root. His father always said: "Ketut, if you know where your feet stand, you also know where your soul is." He found that beautiful, even if he did not fully understand it. Yet he repeated it to himself, like a song: teken, tangan, tanah.
He laughed when his grandmother stuck a flower behind his ear. He stuck his tongue out. She tapped his head. It sounded like a stone in a bell. They laughed together. The scents of the morning—spicy, moist, alive—hung between them.
But the earth beneath his feet would not remain what it was. What today still yielded softly would tomorrow push back. What today still loved would tomorrow choke in blood and ash. The mud in which he played would be riddled with shards and tears. Where this morning he had still laid jasmine, tomorrow nothing would lie but trampled colour. And his thirty-three steps to the river—obliterated beneath the boots of the devil.
This was his last morning. His last moments with grandmother. His last flower, with seven petals, for a God who would not protect him. His last nod and face full of sunlight. His last scent of pandan and incense. He would never learn to tie a fishing net. No blessing would be stroked over his head. The earth that had carried him would turn red tomorrow.
The "expedition"
Somewhere at sea, beyond the horizon where Ketut could no longer look, the ships were already waiting. On board sat men of flesh and blood, but on paper they were only numbers in an operation. One of them was Anton Thümann, promoted since 29 May 1906 to sergeant in the 13th and 11th infantry battalion.
As sergeant he now had 8 to 10 men under him. Boys like he himself had once been: Indies lads with no safety net, Javanese volunteers, Moluccan warriors, and the occasional European working off penalty points by serving with brown people at the front line. To them he now said: "Dress the ranks." "Don't look." "Weapon safe." He told boys when to keep quiet and when to fire. He had finally reached the level where his father had stalled 23 years earlier. Same rank. Different island.
The pretext for their presence on Bali was small and distant. In 1904 a Chinese vessel had run aground off the coast. Such things happened often. According to Balinese customary law the ruler was then entitled to salvage what could be salvaged: tawan karang. According to Batavia, proper compensation was owed to the owner. The ruler of Badung refused. "Our waters, our right." Two years later that incident was compressed in Dutch documents into one dry sentence: "The population of Badung refused to pay compensation regarding the stranded vessel. Therefore: punishment justified." Enough to wake the island.
At sunrise the boats landed on the beach. First the rows of rowers, then the scaling ladders—as if they were about to storm a fortress. In reality they sank up to their ankles in the warm sand. The wind smelled of salt and seaweed, and behind the palms Bali was still simply getting up. Birds sang. Women hung out the washing. A few children pointed at the ships and giggled because men in boots looked so awkward in the surf.
KNIL soldiers landing at Sanur (1906). Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 10056)
For Anton it felt immediately different from Borneo. No dark jungle swallowing every sound, no leeches on your socks, no men who could hit you with a blowpipe from the shadows. Here everything was open and clean. The light was bright, the air sweet. It seemed more like a morning walk than an expedition.
A corporal beside him whispered: "This is no war. This is a parade."
And yet they had full equipment: rifles with bayonets, ammunition belts, scaling ladders, even a small artillery piece on beach wheels that squeaked in the sand. Because you always had to show that you had brought more than the village could ever muster.
Battery of 12 cm howitzers at Sanur (1906). Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 10061)
From the beach they moved into the interior. The Dutch called it "presence". In practice: walking armed through a different village every day so that everyone knew who was now in charge.
KNIL soldiers on their way to Denpasar (1906). Sources: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 10091 & 10103)
In the mornings that was almost homely. They passed farmyards where rice was steaming, where a woman with a coconut brush was sweeping the floor wet. And then they saw her. She stood half in the shadow of the awning, hips tight in a kamen, upper body uncovered, skin glistening with oil, her hair swept back in a single movement. Not provocatively. Not shyly. Simply: that was how one dressed here. This was tropical logic, not European modesty.
For most men in the detachment that was not "simply". They came from garrison worlds of buttons, collars and corsets. Their eyes lingered just a fraction too long. First one. Then two. Then that half-snigger. The half-joke exchanged between them. "You'd just…" with a hand gesture that needed no translation.
Anton saw it immediately. That staring. That whispering. He knew this from Gombong, from Borneo: a group of young men with power in a village where no one can shout "no" in Dutch—that is not a good combination.
"Eyes front, he said. Command tone.
"But sergeant, she—"
"Forward."
The column shifted its gaze back to the path. The woman remained standing as she stood, but her eyes hardened. Not afraid; rather affronted. As if someone had walked into her temple with muddy shoes.
Villagers on Bali. Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 1401787)
Then the patrol work simply continued. Sometimes there was counting to be done. The lieutenant would summon the village elder. He came in his sarong, head bowed, often with a young man who could interpret. Then questions were asked about rice, about men, about boats. "There were more, the lieutenant would say. "More were seen yesterday." And then they looked: at sheds, at boats, at men who had gone off in just the wrong direction. That was "breaking disobedience".
They conducted small raids. Not always violent. Sometimes just: three men to the left, search the house, check whether any krisses were hanging that were too fine for a fisherman. Most men handed over their weapon. But there was always one who did not. An older man, often. Someone who said: "This belonged to my father." Then the tone changed. Then Anton was the one who said with a sergeant's voice: "Hand it over." Not shouting, but not asking either. If it still did not happen, the bayonet went from safe to sharp. You did not even need to use it; the metal said enough.
And there were the small injustices that appear in no report. A soldier taking a bunch of bananas "because we're here for your safety anyway". A native boy who steps aside just too late and gets a blow. A woman who does not clear her yard quickly enough and is pushed aside by two men, too roughly for someone who has just been carrying water. A pig that is "requisitioned" and from which soup is simply cooked that evening.
In the afternoons they sometimes simply drilled on an open field. Rifle drill before the eyes of farmers leading their buffalo on a rope. "Aim… take aim… fire!" The intention was that people saw that this army never slept. That there was always a group somewhere that could loose a volley within a minute.
In the evenings, back in camp, an uneasy quiet descended. No jungle taking over everything at night. Only crickets, a distant gamelan, occasionally a dog. The men lay in their hammocks under mosquito nets. Someone threw a card. Someone recounted what he had seen: "That one fellow wouldn't hand over his kris. Thought he was still living in the Majapahit era." Laughter. Sloppy, brief. Then again silence.
When Anton lay awake then, he heard the sea. He smelled the salt air. And he felt that the island had not yet been broken. That it had only been startled. As if Bali itself were thinking: If this is all there is, we can bear it.
But Anton had already too often seen what followed days like these. First the parade. Then the refusal. Then the order. Then the shooting.
The island seemed to be waiting.
Startled Balinese (1906). Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 10064)
The puputan (Badung, 1906)
That morning something hung in the air that did not belong to the heat. The sun was the same, the palms were the same, but the sounds from the city were different: drums, bells, hurried voices behind walls. The scouts had already reported that smoke was rising from the puri. Not panic smoke. Ritual smoke.
The column set itself in motion as if it were a practice march. Ranks straight, helmets right, weapons at the same height. They marched into Denpasar "as if in a dress parade", someone would later write.
At the edge of the city they saw the first signs: abandoned farmyards, doors open, an offering basket still steaming on the doorstep. In Kesiman people had already rid themselves of their ruler; the palace stood half ablaze. No one throwing stones. No one fleeing. Only emptiness, and then further on that rhythm of drums that would not stop.
Before the puri of Denpasar the column halted. The captain passed on the hand signals. Safe. Wait. Barrel on the ground. You could smell the smoke from the puri—incense, burnt wood, ghee. A wild beating of drums sounded from within.
Then the gate opened.
No enemy came out. A procession came out.
At the front the raja in white, on a palanquin, carried by four men. White as for a cremation. Jewellery, gold, kris in his hand. Behind him his family: women with oiled hair, children, priests, servants. Everyone in white. Everyone already anointed. They walked slowly, with dignity, as if they had known this for days.
Some women threw jewellery and coins at the feet of the Dutch soldiers. Not as a gift. As mockery. As if they wished to say: you can take this, but not us.
"Halt!" called the captain. But no one halted.
They came to within a hundred paces. The raja stepped down from the palanquin. He made a small gesture. The priest before him plunged the kris into his chest. That was how it was done. The rest of the procession simply moved on, like water over a stone.
There was a shot. No one knew from whom. Perhaps from the procession, perhaps from an overly nervous rifle at the back. It hardly mattered. A fraction of a second later the Dutch side returned fire. First a few. Then, once one lieutenant called "Fire!", the full volley.
White fell. Bodies tumbled over one another, jewellery rolled away, children were torn from arms. More people came through the gate, in white, with flowers, with krisses, with nothing at all. The mouths of artillery opened. The mouths of rifles spewed. The mouths of the Balinese spoke no more.
Anton stood to the right of the line. He saw how a woman with a baby at her breast was struck without crying out. He saw how a man first stabbed himself and only then fell from a bullet. He saw how the white turned red within seconds.
And he saw a boy.
Small. About eight. His sarong wet with the dew of that morning. In his hand a few flowers, hastily gathered, incense sticks among them. He was not looking at the rifles. He was looking up, as if searching for his grandmother. A body from in front fell half on top of him. The flowers flew away. The boy went down with it.
The smoke hung low. At the side a soldier was already bending towards something that gleamed—reflex, not policy. "Oi, leave that, a non-commissioned officer snapped at him. They had never seen anything like this. It was not in the drill book.
Anton looked at the square. At white that was turning red. At flowers that had been trampled. At the raja's palanquin, overturned, the raja himself half beneath it, hand still around the kris. He felt his arms tingling. Not with triumph. With something that resembled revulsion.
In Batavia and later in the newspapers in the Netherlands it sounded different. There it was said that "the recalcitrant rajas of Badung had finally been brought to reason" and that "the Dutch flag now flew unchallenged over South Bali." Figures were cited: so many dead, so few losses on our side. There was even talk of "an impressive demonstration of loyalty and courage of the troops."
But figures do not tell you that among the dead there were also children. They do not tell you how quickly the square changed colour. And they do not tell you that even the loudest fell briefly silent.
On Bali itself, 20 September 1906 received a different name: puputan—the ending, the going to the very last extreme. Not a "chastisement", but a voluntary descent into death rather than living in humiliation under that accursed tricolour. That version was not printed in the newspaper headlines. No. That side of the story was only whispered onwards. From court to village. From grandmother to grandchild.
KNIL soldiers looking on at the victims of the Balinese ritual mass suicide (20 September 1906). Sources: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 10084 & 10092)
The final puputan (Klungkung, 1908)
People thought Bali had been "pacified" in 1906. Denpasar in flames, the puri of Pemecutan plundered, the ruler of Tabanan dead in prison. But peace brought by cannons always remains somewhat hollow: you only need to push in a tax, a monopoly or a new humiliation and it tears open again.
In 1908 Anton was on Bali again because of the opium question. No stranded junk this time, but something even blunter: Batavia wanted to keep the opium trade under its own control, and part of Bali refused to grow quietly rich from that arrangement. In Gelgel a Javanese opium trader was killed. Riots were reported. Reports spoke of "disturbances". And whoever says "disturbances" in a colony then almost automatically says: troops.
They first moved on Gelgel. There a swift, hard intervention followed, for the sake of example. A hundred Balinese fell, the reports noted. After that the raja fled to Klungkung. And then the pattern of 1906 was played out again, but smaller, fiercer, with fewer people—and for that very reason more intimate.
Klungkung had always had something untouchable about it. The Dewa Agung sat there not only as ruler, but also as bearer of an ancient, almost mythical authority. There was a story that his kris would one day strike the enemy itself, without his needing to strike. Such stories keep a people upright for a long time.
Descending from Selat towards Klungkung. Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 30039)
On 18 April 1908 the confrontation came. Dutch fire had already struck the city; there had been bombardment. The walls bore gunpowder, not flowers. And yet once more a procession came out. Again white. Again jewellery. Again women and women behind him. The Dewa Agung walked in front, kris in hand—the blade of which it was said would break the enemy.
But the blade broke nothing. The steel of the other side was stronger.
There was no grand parade as in Denpasar. No hundreds at once. Rather a desperate, dignified sortie of some two hundred followers who knew it was finite. The king was struck by a Dutch bullet, not by his own prophecy. His wives made the gesture that on Bali had for generations made words unnecessary. Others followed. Not because they thought they would win, but because they did not want to be left behind in a world that had been so annexed.
Anton stood this time further back. As sergeant he kept the line in order, counted, passed on what came from the front. It had almost become routine: arrival, command, volley, clear up. That very fact gave him that stabbing feeling in his chest. 1906 he could still see as a one-off. 1908 proved it was a method.
He recognised everything: the smell of incense that the gunpowder could not quite mask, the way women had oiled their hair as if it were a celebration, the soft falling of bodies that in their white had not been designed for mud. And he also recognised what happened afterwards: that again Dutch hands moved over the bodies of dead men, women and children to take away jewellery, because that was "customary".
It must have struck him with dismay: we had learned nothing from Denpasar.
"How can you blame him, I would like to write now, "for something that was hammered into him from the age of eight?" From the school in Gombong to the depot account in Borneo, the Netherlands had told him that his mother had heathen customs, that serving under the tricolour was the highest calling, that disobedience had to be harshly punished. In 1906 he carried that out. In 1908 again.
Yet in 1904 he had signed his own name. How much fate still resides in a life once you begin to cast your vote alongside the power that has made you?
But between those two dates lies something new: shame.
After Klungkung, too, it was written that the operation had proceeded "as desired". That the opium question had been "brought to an end". But what had actually happened bore a painful resemblance to what had occurred two years earlier in Denpasar: a small procession, in white, that chose to give itself away rather than submit to humiliation.
More than a century later, in September 2025, I, Anton's great-great-grandson, stood before the monument in Denpasar. Bronze and stone, names that were not mine, and yet it felt strangely intimate. Their dead are recorded; his are not. Their names stand in the square; his name stands only in my head. As if one family history has stood on two sides of the same shot.
Perhaps this is why I write it down: so that the procession in white and the sergeant in khaki no longer exist separately. So that what was noted in 1906 and 1908 as "operation as desired" can lie alongside the arched linen and the krisses. So that I can acknowledge that I bear no guilt, but am an heir. And that between incense and gunpowder there is space for one story.
"Even in the hems of your garments is found the blood of the innocent..." — Jeremiah 2:34
Moluccas, 1910–1913
The sea towards the Moluccas is not a straight line but a fan of islands. Anton stood at the railing and felt the moist easterly wind. He was 28. About as old as his father had been when he died in 1882. His first twelve KNIL years were behind him. He could have left. But on 7 October 1910, in Gombong—the very place where he had been brought as a boy—he signed his name once more. Four more years. Bonus: f 200. For someone without family that was a great deal. And perhaps more importantly: here he at least belonged somewhere.
Register extract covering the full 24-year military career of Anton Herman Gerard Hendrik Thümann. Source: National Archives The Hague (NL-HaNA_2.10.50.02_439_0085)
On his papers it read: "re-engaged with the colonial troops, both in and outside Europe… destined for the garrison battalion of Ambon and Ternate." He knew Java. He knew Borneo. He knew Bali—too well. The Moluccas were new: spice islands, Christian villages, headhunters, and sago.
Ambon was smaller than he had expected. A few barracks on stilts, a commandant's residence, a small church, a munitions shed. Beyond that, the green began immediately. In the evenings, as the sun sank behind the island, they heard psalms in Ambonese Malay everywhere. Fishing boats tapped against one another, someone beat cloves to dry. It did not smell of rice and incense as in Bali, but of salt, smoke and spice. This was no court island. This was frontier sea. And across the bay: Seram—or Nusa Ina, the mother island of the Moluccans.
At first they did what every detachment did: stand watch, build roads, patrol to a village that was slow in paying its taxes, mediate in a dispute over a coconut plot.
In the monthly reports of 1911 it is noted somewhere in passing that there were "repeated cases of cholera" "among natives, of whom some have succumbed." In the papers that is a footnote; in the villages they were steambaths of fear and children's voices that suddenly disappeared. The disease moved through the villages like a murmur against which no command could prevail.
Armed Police, Amahai
After a year in the Moluccas his role changed. On 18 October 1911 he was transferred to the Corps of Armed Police Constables in Amahai. No frontline—order maintenance. In practice he became the man who had to teach Moluccan boys to shoot. For Anton it was closer to the people than he had ever been before.
The controller's residence at Amahai on Seram. Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 17166)
His task was clear: to teach young men—Ambonese, Menadonese, and mixed-race Indies boys—to march, shoot, and follow orders. To drum the Dutch rhythm into them so that they could use it later against their own fellow villagers if those became troublesome.
Every morning he was again on the wet red earth of the drill ground. The sun was not yet even hot and yet the sweat was already running down his back. Before him a row of barefoot men, cloths around their hips, some with a small hand-carved cross around their necks. Their rifles did not gleam as they did on Java; these were used weapons, sometimes too old. They held them awkwardly, keeping them slightly away from themselves, as if they knew how quickly such a thing could go the wrong way.
"Rifle… present!" called Anton.
Their voices did not answer. Only metal tapping against wood. One man in the middle—dark skin, a scar along his jaw—looked at him just a fraction too long. Not defiantly. Questioningly. As if he wanted to say: Tomorrow, if there is unrest in my village, do you want me to shoot at my own family?
Anton knew that look. It was the same look he himself had once had when a sergeant in Gombong had given him catechism instruction: serve God, king and flag. He heard himself now speaking their language—broken Malay with an Indies accent: "Kalau ada perintah, harus ikut. Tak boleh pikir."
In the afternoons they sought shade under the corrugated iron awning. The same man with the scar on his jaw now sat opposite him with a weapon he clearly did not yet trust. Then Anton cleaned the weapons with them. His hands did what they had been doing for twenty years: sight clean, barrel oiled, trigger dry. He could see from their fingers that they were fishermen, gardeners, sago-tappers—not soldiers. He taught them the grip, the pace, the posture nonetheless. And as he corrected their hands, he recognised their obedience. It was the same obedience that had straightened him as an eight-year-old in Gombong—and now he was straightening them.
Lossa, 1912
Yet it did not remain confined to drill on the red earth. His name appears once in the columns of the Preanger-bode and the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad: "Report of the patrol of the European sergeant instructor Thumann."
An acting civil administrator had in June 1912 attempted to arrest some ten suspects for a murder at Hatumeten. The prime suspect: Moenika Ilela from the village of Lossa, on the Teluty Bay in South Seram. The men escaped. The population took a hostile stance.
Anton was given a patrol of armed police constables to get hold of the remaining suspects. Before the sun had risen above the sea, they set off from Amahai: a row of men with packs, rifles and black boots.
Before them lay not a road but a direction. First the coast, then the interior: creeks up to their thighs, roots sticking out of the ground like sticks, leeches you only noticed when they grew warm against your skin. Machetes tapped against trunks, fuses were dried in the scarce sun, rice clumped in the hand. In the afternoon came the short, fierce rain; at night they burned wet wood to keep warm. A man coughed, another wore his heel raw; someone stopped speaking from the second night onwards. The sound of the waves faded ever further into the background—less sea, more forest—and the voices of the men sank a tone lower.
He walked at the front, counting their paces in his head as on the drill ground, but here no command echoed back—only the rustling of the dense forest, and somewhere ahead a bird that startled too early.
An Alfur village in the highlands of Seram. Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 2949)
At the edge of Lossa the bamboo fence finally loomed up. Anton saw smoke beneath low canopies of leaves, red stains of betel along the planks. A drum beat once and fell silent. Two men came forward with rattan shields; behind them stood boys with bows half raised, arrows still in hand, women looking through the gaps between posts. In the stories from the barracks they were called Alfurs, headhunters, heathens; in reality they were people who did not wish to give up their old way of life at the behest of the white man.
Alfur chieftains on Seram. Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 4879)
The kepala soa—Tokeh—stepped onto the open ground. Old scar, calm eyes. Anton made a sign; the interpreter stepped forward. "Kepala soa, said Anton slowly, "kami minta Moenika Ilela itu keluar." Tokeh listened, glanced for a moment over Anton's shoulder into the forest where the path disappeared. "Ini urusan kami, he replied softly. "Orang tidak keluar." Someone behind the palisade coughed, hoarsely. Children were called inside. A bow was drawn tighter.
Anton felt how far he was from the barracks, how the power of the government ended where the path entered the green. He repeated the summons, more formally now. The kepala soa took one step forward, planted his spear in the ground. He wiped betel-red from his lip and let it fall between them. "Ini tanah adat. Ini urusan kami. Orang tidak keluar." Behind him someone pulled the bamboo gate shut; the rope was tensioned with a knot that said more than any speech. Boys lifted their bows a finger higher. An arrow tapped in the sand before Anton's boot. That was the answer.
The newspaper reports drily that Anton's first patrol "had no success due to the firm refusal of the kepala soa Tokeh at Lossa to surrender said persons."
On paper that was all. In the field it meant: withdraw beyond the line of sight of the palisade, count how many arrows lay on the ground, share water from a tin field bottle and compile a report in short sentences. He sent a messenger back to Amahai with the report of refusal and a request for instructions. In all likelihood it was this same message that prompted higher authority to decide on "active intervention": the assistant-resident and the detachment from Wahai would join up and prevent the Lossa Alfurs from withdrawing to surrounding villages.
The days that followed grew longer. The patrols grew larger.
They moved via Hatoe and Fohatan—names that look small on the map and can seem endless in the forest. Sometimes they came to a village where only smoke still told a story; women and children had already gone into the hills. In the empty houses they found overturned pots and discarded arrowheads on a cloth.
At old Lossa came the first response. It did not begin with a volley but with a hum—the sound of an arrow that you only hear once it has already passed. "Cover!" someone called. An arrow struck a trunk, another rattled noisily into a crate. On the other side nothing moved and yet everything was alive. The civil administrator ordered calm. "No shooting without command." Two "absolutely necessary" shots followed, the echo hanging for a moment between the mountain ridges, then again the silence of a forest that pretends to be deaf.
Further. The column grew longer: the Wahai detachment at the front, the Amahai detachment—Anton's men—behind for cover, or the other way around; the reports no longer mention names, only direction. Via Hatoe again, to Koloputih, "well fortified" the columns noted. In the sand they sketched the palisade with a stick. "Summons, said the administrator. Three times. Women and children were already gone. What remained was the taut breath of men behind bamboo.
The attack did not come with a shot but like a wave: spears and parangs, some forty men, shadows falling from the green. A spear tapped against a rifle butt—that dry sound he would never forget—another slid diagonally along a sleeve and left a cut in someone's skin only a metre further on. "Steady, called Anton, more to his own chest than to his line. "Aim. Short." The response was again those few shots that the paper called "necessary". Someone fell in the grass—later one of the chieftains named a name: Captain Salipi Luhihata. And then, as happens when one side hears that the other has gunpowder and you do not: retreat and disappear.
Koloputih was taken after the summons. No cheering. Only the cutting of rattan bonds, the pushing open of a door with a battering ram, the smell of old fire. "Captured: large quantities of arrows, throwing spears, bows and parangs, they noted. "The enemy was not in possession of firearms." It reads as if it is reassuring. To him it sounded like a confession: an unequal fight.
Five dead on their side, none on ours. Figures that look light in print but that you carry home from the field in your conscience. In the days that followed, "making contact with the population" was attempted again; sometimes a chieftain came, sometimes a shadow, sometimes only an echo. And somewhere between Yaputih and Fohatan—that stretch where the river looks wider than on the map—he understood how far he was from Bali and yet how close to the same story: men who did not want to give up their land, men who had been trained to put them on it.
At the end, in August, the resident reported: "the armed resistance on Seram has been completely broken." The detachment of military men and the armed police returned—to Wahai and to Amahai respectively. Anton too. In his pocket crinkled a paper with words like "refusal", "summons", "order restored". He shared the last mouthful from the field bottle. His duty was done.
The newspaper headline "Beyond the bounds of civilisation", containing a report of the patrol commanded by the European sergeant instructor Thumann. Source: De Preanger-bode of 16 October 1912
Forbidden love
The villages on Seram were small. Too small for secrets. Whoever walked past the shed knew who was giving lessons there. Whoever stood at the jetty knew who was coming ashore. And whoever saw a girl talking to the European sergeant remembered it. The archive is silent about their first conversation; what follows is a careful reconstruction—precise enough to feel breath between the lines, but no more than that.
You often heard her before you saw her. Josina Akolo, sixteen, daughter of Frans Akolo and Penina Ruspana from Kairatu. Christian. Neat in her sarong with a rustling bamboo basket against her hip. She knew exactly who Anton was: the sergeant of the Armed Police, the man of the government. The man from the side that—at least on paper—always wins. Perhaps he sat on the veranda drying his boots; she walked past with a smile.
It could have stayed at that. As it should in a colony: he European, she native. Greeting. Done. But she came more often. Sometimes she stopped just outside the wooden step. He sat polishing his buttons until they shone; she watched. Not boldly, but consciously. This was the man before whom men here stood to attention—and she remained standing.
Her risk was the greatest. A sixteen-year-old "native Christian woman", becoming pregnant out of wedlock by a European sergeant? That is no minor village transgression. That is a disgrace before the church council, before the village elders, a matter that can reach the resident if it comes to light. Certainly if that military man was supposed to have been upholding moral standards. So there was whispering in the village.
Frans Akolo had perhaps seen him on the street. Later, inside—as I imagine it—he said to Josina: "Bapa seng suka. Dia itu serdadu." But something had already shifted; the silence grew heavier.
Anton's service register then skips a page: 21 September 1912 relieved as instructor at Amahai; 9 November 1912 "returned from memorandum"—between those dates nothing but silence. But silence is also a space. In those weeks he did not sail out, did not march; he waited. And somewhere between spring tide nights near Kairatu and mornings when rain tapped against zinc, they decided what the archive never recorded. Count back from the first cry in July 1913, and you arrive at October 1912. Precisely between those pages.
Whether his relief from Amahai was prompted by complaints about his relations with Josina, no dossier says. The calendar nods; the documents are silent.
Saturday 19 July 1913, Josina gave birth in Kairatu to their first son: Ferdinand Theodoor Thümann, or simply Ferry. Probably no longer under her own roof. Probably not with all her family's hands present. She had paid the price. In our family one sentence later lingered on: "She was cast out."
One month later—30 August 1913—Anton appears in the registers in Surabaya, "transferred to the subs. cadre". After nearly 3 years in the Moluccas, he was back on Java. Josina? She went with him. Not as a romantic heroine with a suitcase and a dream, but as a young, dependent mother with a child, in the shadow of the man with the uniform. On paper it was called "allowance" and "persons to be conveyed". In reality it was called: staying. The most disobedient thing about Anton here was his faithfulness to Josina.
"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you." — Ezekiel 36:26
Choose life then
After more than two years of being "temporarily unfit for field service", Anton left the army on 14 October 1916. It was no punishment or scandal. A signature under "honourably discharged". He already had Josina and Ferry at his side. The rifle went away; the responsibility remained. He did what so many former KNIL men did: he went into the agricultural industries. First at the Menang sugar factory near Kediri. Later at Soemberdadi in Kras. In between a lime kiln. From that moment on he was no longer a sergeant who had to dismantle villages, but a man who each month had to earn enough to support a wife and a row of children.
Interior of a European residence at the Menang Sugar Factory east of Kediri. Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 123431)
Sugar was also a colony, but built differently. The European or Indo supervisor. Javanese field gangs. Madurese for the heavier seasonal work. A Chinese man at the books. Everyone had a reason to be there. It was less loud than the army, but no less strict. No flag, but profit. In the mornings he checked pumps and boilers: enough water, steam pressure in order, no leaking pipes. Then the cane carts—oxen, headcloths, cane still wet from the night. When a press jammed, he heard it immediately. He knew machines as he knew rifles: first look, then speak.
Cutting grounds at a sugar factory near Kediri. Source: Leiden University Libraries (KITLV 7742)
Meanwhile his family grew. On Saturday 5 September 1914, in Malang, their second son was born: Guus. On Wednesday 7 April 1915 he and his older brother were baptised together in Menang near Kediri. In 1916, in Kediri, came the third: Charles—born on Tuesday 4 July, at Guroh.
Once more they returned to the Moluccas. On Wednesday 17 April 1918 their son Ruud was born in Kairatu. Whether Josina returned to repair family ties—her parents died in 1913 and 1916—cannot be said with certainty. It seems likely; I dare not make more of it than that.
Thereafter Java became the axis again. In Ngawi on Tuesday 1 April 1919 came Jan. And on a clammy Sunday evening, 2 January 1921, followed Freddy.
At home Anton was no longer the sergeant, but you could still hear the army in him. "Don't walk sloppily." "Put your sandals on." "Greet first." That was not cruelty. That was his language of care. He had learned: what you love, you organise. The KNIL had pushed obedience into him as a survival mechanism; he passed it on as a protective mechanism.
In 1922 they had their only daughter: Charlotte—born on Sunday 22 January. A girl among all those boys. For a moment the house seemed taller—a different laugh, a different voice, small hands pulling at Josina's hair. She looked like her mother. In 1923 followed Eduard, on Tuesday 9 October. In 1924 came Adolf, on Sunday 3 August. In that same year Charlotte disappeared. No newspaper, no army dossier; only a small body, washed with cool water, wrapped in cloths, carried by her father himself. Anton had seen men die. But nothing weighed so strangely light as this small girl of his own. Perhaps he thought: so this is how it feels from the other side.
Perhaps that was also the moment he decided to finally put it on paper. Wednesday 10 March 1926, Ngawi: Anton Herman Gerard Hendrik Thümann marries Josina Akolo. After more than ten years together. After nine children and house moves. Late—he was 44, she thirty—but finally formal. Practically too: the children now received his name in the books, not only by word of mouth. But it was more than paper. Josina no longer stood "alongside" him, she stood beside him. This was the first time he had claimed someone for himself, not because the army demanded it, but because his heart did.
The circle closed
I do not know. But I can imagine that twenty-four years of uniform rarely leave a heart at peace. That he woke at night and felt something heavy that had not yet been given a name. As if there were still ash in the seams of his sleep. That the puri lay again where he had left it, the procession passed by once more. And very close, that one word that could not be washed from him: "Fire!" There was no one left to blame; the hand beneath the command was his.
During the day he muffled it with work. But there was something that worked even better: riding. First by cart and horse. Later, when he could afford it, on a motorbike. Wind in your face, noise that drowns out everything, no one calling "forward". It was the opposite of a column: not in step, but alone. Not a lieutenant setting the pace, but your own right hand. Perhaps that is why he rode a motorbike so gladly: not to seem tough, but because in his head it only truly fell silent when the engine roared. The jungle of Borneo, the cries on Bali, the clattering of the shed at Amahai—all sank away behind the sound.
Saturday 26 February 1927. Division of Ngawi, residency of Madiun—the road was dry and dusty. To the left buffaloes laboured in the rice paddies. To the right the rustling of wind through the reeds. He knew this bend; he had taken it before at lower speed. But now he was alone. No detachment. No superior. Only he and the motorbike. Wind in his face, shirt flapping, no one counting whether he was keeping step. For the first time since Gombong, he was steering.
He did not slow down. The air was warm on his cheeks. One more second: the throttle held open a fraction too long, the line of the bend closing just too late. His heart beat high; sound briefly faded and came back sharper. He saw too much at once: a white heron rising above the rice paddy, a frayed rope on a post, strips of shadow from sugarcane across the road surface. The handlebars trembled.
"Awas, Pak!" someone called, but the wind swallowed the voice. His right wrist corrected, his knee pushed against the tank, his shoulder leaned in. No grip. The front wheel took half a step to the side—so small that his head denied it while his body already knew what was coming.
He had a wife. He had sons. And one whose heartbeat you could still count under Josina's hand—Jack. He, born without a father, was now riding a line that threatened to close again.
And then came the blow…
His bloodied body lay paralysed against the rock face. His leather cap had been flung from his head. His dark hair still fluttered briefly in the wind. And his heart stopped between two unspoken sentences… For the first time since Gombong, he had nowhere left to go.
"For the wages of sin is death..." — Romans 6:23
Death certificate of Anton Herman Gerard Hendrik Thümann. Source: Private collection of Charles Jozef Thümann, drawn up at the request of Freddy Thümann.
