Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/24

Rh the ladangs or open up new clearings in the jungle,—for preference, in out-of-the-way corners.

Thus then the gampongs of Acheh and its dependencies became partly depopulated, and the illimitable virgin forest became dotted, here and there, with temporary clearings used as the settlements sometimes of large communities, sometimes of petty bands,—situated as far as possible from any common path, very difficult to trace and as good as inaccessible for large military forces. The people remaining in the gampongs in apparent submission really sided with the expelled section so that the ladang-dwellers always found a cordial reception awaiting them in the gampongs, while the gampong-dwellers, when they had anything to their discredit, knew where they could safely retire to. Furthermore bands could count on safe hiding-places when they wished among the Gayōs and Alassers, Mohammedan subjects of Acheh.

Achehnese bands had to gather together and act for short periods only wherever through enquiries or the reports of their spies, they had reason to believe that they stood a good chance of winning some advantage or another. They were rarely exposed to attack on any large scale, for the almost inaccessible country that they understood in every detail helped them as an ally and enabled them to break up into small parties or even singly to betake themselves to their temporary places of refuge whenever necessary. The question of provisions troubled them but little; they found on the spot pretty nearly everything necessary to satisfy their modest requirements. For serious attacks they made use of fanatics who, fortified by the assurance of their teachers that any one who fell in a war against infidels would go straight to heaven, eagerly went to their death, and of assassins who pretended to be friendly so as to help the cause by gaining admission to some camp and there plunging into slaughter. Is it wonderful then that many a man, shrugging his shoulders, asked himself how all this was to end, and believed that the troops, to accomplish their task, would have to be not only brave and resourceful but ubiquitous?

Truly and  whom we have already quoted, had grasped the situation in its most literal sense. It was necessary "to subdue all the chiefs",—and their name was legion!

Only as guerillas against guerillas, by using the most lightly equipped native troops under the leadership of first-rate European officers with non-commissioned officers of like quality, and by operating in small