1821 - The Battle for Palembang

17: Patchwork, Siegework (Gombora Island, 1821)

Dutch Lines Besieging Fortress Gombora, Musi River, 1821

When Peter Wolesley had learnt of history's many wars, from Leonidas in Thermopylae to the Lines of Wellington, he understood that war existed as an inseparable event from human existence and one of bombastic fireworks and great clashes of ideals. The names of generals and kings, Alexander, Caesar, Marlborough, occupied the history books as great captains of military brilliance. On another perspective, the liberal kind might see war as essentially an ends to economic means and extension of government policy to increase their books; war is business, and for many, like those heads of the East India Company, the manufacturers of arms and uniforms, the business is indeed, war.

But those, Wolesley realised, were mere ideas. In the here and now, those ideas no longer mattered.

Wolesley now understood war as not little more than a miserable struggle of one man trying to outsmart the other in vice, piled in with dirt, mud guts, and most excruciating, the hunger and exhaustion that plagued the mind and soul. Soldiering was more than drill squares, tactics, and bravery; it was the test of a man against whatever nature and the Fates could throw at him. This, indeed, had not considered disease, especially in such tropical areas, that had killed more men than the fighting itself; and last, the enemy, the bastards whose souls Wolesley despised, and the cause of the most gruesome of deaths: blown away, torn apart, mangled, stabbed, disembowelled. He had seen them all, and how they screamed as they died, how they prayed as they died, how they cried, calling out their mothers and lovers, as they died... Officers and ranker both.

Wolesley thought of that Lieutenant Simpson, too, who held onto a letter meant for a lover who did not love him and thus never reply, far away in England, even until the final moment before the Fates had taken him too.

Wolesley liked Simpson. He thought he was a proper soldier–educated, well-mannered, and calm at command. Sergeant De Zeeuw now took over his role as second-in-command, while guiding the young Ensign Kollewijn who was too young. What a sad fate that had befallen him, that Simpson, but Wolesley hoped he could be in better peace now. He had not heard a word of him since that engagement by Muntinghe's Town and no replacement officers would come from Batavia either, so the Light Company had to make do.

The siege of Gombora, which had been going on for about two weeks, had drained the Light Company slowly, and painfully. Such was the nature of siegework and breaching; it was unlike any other action, all being paced seemingly at a gallop. Where battles on open fields allowed the soldier to independently act to his senses, in sieges, the infantryman had switched his musket for shovels, their muscles from firing and loading to the digging of great earthworks to creep towards the enemy fortifications.

And that was why, under a self-made shade amongst the long trenches, Wolesley sat shirtless, donning only his boots and trousers, many painful of sunburns upon his skin, arms rough and palms scarred from the digging. His musket had been left at the tents and bivouacs, grouped with the rest of his section and now next to him was no weapon of war, but a shovel of iron. For the last two weeks since crossing the Musi and upon this wretched isle filled with abatis, cannon-shot, and death, Peter Wolesley's purpose as a fighting man had turned to that of a construction worker, his field the pits he dug, not the lines and columns a soldier was to fight in.

Peter Wolesley hated it. The first and manual nature of the work weren't the only things he despised, however, it was the slow, killing nature of the work. Several Thirteenth Regiment men had been carried away from the line-diggings that enfiladed the great stoneworks of Gombora, all of them with swollen faces, burning fevers and sunstroke or cold with death. The heat had swept many Hollanders, Belgians, and Frenchmen clean off their feet, followed by a fever treated with the most insufficient remedies—the nearest field hospital was at Muntinghe's Town and the aid station on the Gombora works was overcapacity. Many of those who had been taken away not by the enemy's sword but by the siege itself did not return to the lines, and thus, they were gone forever. The Light Company itself had at least twenty-five men taken away due to fever and exhaustion, almost twice the amount of casualties received during the engagement at Brabant's Ford.