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the Malay language. Repatriated to London, where Indonesian students introduced him to Woodman’s circle, he set up a kind of unofficial information bureau for the republic. He translated Sjahrir’s Our struggle into English, and distributed it to United Nations delegates at their meeting at Westminster Hall. With the patronage of John Maynard Keynes, he also invited a Balinese dance company to perform in London. Coast worked his passage back to Southeast Asia and would serve Sjahrir’s government for several years.118 The republic also had supporters at the heart of the British operation: in December in Jakarta, two British NCOs produced a critical news sheet, News from Indonesia, and assisted in the publication of an English-language weekly, Independent. The British were conducting their war in an unprecedented glare of publicity. It was no longer possible to suppress colonial subjects in private.

For this reason, both the Dutch and the British governments welcomed the Sjahrir administration, but they remained bitterly divided on how to move forward. To Dening, the Dutch failure to appreciate reality was ‘astonishing’. The Dutch, he told Mountbatten, were ‘mentally sick… one cannot help wondering whether in that condition they are really in a fit state to resume control in this vast area’.119 That said, Dening’s attitude to the Dutch was more conciliatory than Mountbatten’s and he attempted to resign at the end of November in frustration at the supremo’s ‘open advocacy of the Indonesia cause… and his harmful utterances against the Dutch’.120 Christison talked of sending the Dutch on a new Great Trek to the outer islands and the empty interior of New Guinea. This echoed an earlier colonial fantasy of the Dutch themselves; there was in the Netherlands a plan to send Nazi collaborators there.121 Christison was determined to ease the burden on his troops. At the end of November he talked of letting central and eastern Java ‘go to ruin – temporarily’. But the British had obligations, not least a new category of person: IFTU, or ‘Inhabitants Friendly To Us’, the Eurasians, and Chinese – in Surabaya alone, 90,000 of them – and the smaller numbers of Arabs and Indians who were now dependent on British protection. In the exodus from Magelang, many Eurasians who had taken refuge there were abandoned. It was mid 1947 before some of them were released in Dutch-held territory.122 In the event, the cities remained occupied, but the weight of Christison’s forces fell back on to Jakarta and attempted to establish a safe perimeter around the city in which normal government could resume and negotiations take place. A new kind of pacification mission began to clear the city of armed men by stages: first to the city limits, then to surrounding villages that were centres of pemuda violence, and then, finally, to secure the triangle between Jakarta, the hill station of Buitenzorg and the major city of Bandung. There was still heavy loss of life. On 10 December a convoy was attacked and seventeen men were killed and another eighty-eight wounded.123 On 27 December, in the first stage of what was now a counter-insurgency operation, 743 Indonesians were arrested and a cordon placed around Jakarta. However, the situation in the city remained tense. Perhaps the main threat to peace there was the Dutch themselves. Although there were only 2,000 Dutch on SEAC strength, there were five times that number present, mostly embittered men from the internment camps, armed and in makeshift uniforms.124 Even Sjahrir himself was beaten on the streets, and he and Amir Sjarifuddin were the target of Dutch bullets. In the face of this, at the end of 1945, Sukarno and Hatta withdrew by special train with most of the government to Yogyakarta. The republic now had an alternative centre in the spiritual heartland of old Java.

For the British, Jakarta was now a major fortress, a new thoroughfare of empire and a strange enclave of calm and normality in the sea of violence. British officers took over the old centre of the British community, the Box Club; the YMCA turned