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By Root 4519 0

the once elite Harmonie Club into a centre for other ranks. ‘It was’, recounted the official history of the ‘Fighting Cock’, 23 Indian Division, ‘not uncommon to be dancing in the evening after dodging bullets. There was a plentiful supply of beer, although even this was subject to revolutionary mood, when the Indonesian brewery threatened to withhold it after they learnt that supplies were reaching the Dutch. There were no lack of Dutch and Eurasian dancing partners.’125 They supplied the secretarial staff for a growing establishment, and supplied their country with information on British intentions. Marriages were contracted with Eurasian girls, who, as van den Bogaerde, now ADC to Major General Douglas Hawthorn, described them, ‘had only the vaguest idea of what England or Europe might be like, and who would have to face the grey north, and new habits and customs in places like Swindon, Manchester, Macclesfield or Croydon’. His own general drew comment about the female entourage he gathered around him in his house in Bandung. The Christmas and New Year of 1945, the Division’s fourth in the field, was celebrated in high style in Jakarta, with the pipes and drums of the Seaforth Highlanders; the Patialas in tamasha to honour the maharajah’s birthday, and a soccer match against the Indonesians. At midnight drunken British officers let loose a massive salvo of gunfire into the air: it was answered by a return of fire across the city which took an hour to subside.126

The dawn of 1946 was marked by another momentous event. On 3 January, at a large ‘people’s congress’ in Purwokerto, central Java, Tan Malaka chose to reveal himself to the public for the first time in twenty-three years. In his speeches, and in writings produced at the time of the struggle in Surabaya, he announced a ‘minimum programme’ for the revolution. It was based on the call for ‘100 per cent Merdeka’. Its radicalism was a yardstick for freedom movements in the region, calling for the immediate departure of all foreign troops from Indonesia, the establishment of a people’s government and the people’s ownership of the economy. It was seen as a major challenge to Sjahrir. A battle for the soul of the Indonesian revolution was underway, which pulled its leaders toward different paths of diplomacy and struggle. This was a dilemma that all Asian nationalisms would face. In Indonesia it seemed that the pemuda had finally found their leader. But in early 1946 Tan Malaka lacked any organization or power base beyond his own mystique. By mid March, in a bitter struggle for power, he was arrested and imprisoned, and the path of diplomacy took precedence for a time. By the time of the British withdrawal, its prospects were uncertain. One of Britain’s most senior diplomats, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, had arrived in February 1946 to act as an honest broker – he was the first Allied leader to call on Prime Minister Sjahrir at his home – and there were abortive talks in Holland in April and May. The British deadline for an agreement was the end of November 1946, when South East Asia Command would wind up its activities. At the eleventh hour, on 15 November, a first diplomatic understanding was reached between the Dutch and the Indonesians, led by Sukarno and Sjahrir, at the hill resort of Linggajati outside Jakarta, to be ratified in March of the following year. It was an agreement for a ceasefire, it recognized de facto republican authority in Java and Sumatra and it spoke of co-operation in the creation of a united Indonesia. But it left the vital issue of sovereignty vague – it was a long way from ‘100 per cent Merdeka’ – and the agreement did not last. By the end of July 1947 fighting had erupted again, with the first of the savage Dutch ‘police actions’ that would, after much bloodshed, finally lose them their empire.

Mountbatten, Christison and others had expended much effort in pushing the Dutch into talks. They recognized the power of Indonesian nationalism, but they had not won its trust. Most British observers, even the most liberal, still thought of nationalism