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Said Sjahrir: "When your troops leave Indonesia I'll say things twice as nice about the Dutch."
Meanwhile British diplomacy, first in the person of Sir Archibald Clark Kerr (now Lord Inverchapel), who was succeeded by Lord Killearn, continued its efforts to bring the Dutch and the Indonesians together. Former Dutch Premier Willem Schermerhorn, who had blamed van Mook for dealing with collaborators, came out to Java and soon found himself discussing the situation over Scotch & soda with Soekarno, whose Mohammedanism is not so rigid that he scorns a drink.
The pact now before the Dutch States-General was drafted last month at Linggadjati. There, with Lord Killearn in the chair, Schermerhorn, van Mook and Soekarno (Sjahrir had one of his frequent colds) haggled out an agreement. The issue finally boiled down to a sentence in Article 2 which referred to Indonesia as a "free democratic state." Soekarno's Economics Minister, 38-year-old A. K. Gani (who once acted in a Batavian-made movie True Love), objected: "That word 'free' is not enough. It should be 'sovereign.' " Van Mook turned to Soekarno: "Will you accept the agreement if it is changed to sovereign?" Almost before he knew it, Soekarno said yes, and the agreement was signed.
Ice in the Jungle. Today, while the Indies wait upon The Netherlands' reaction to the pact, a truce—but no peace—prevails in Indonesia. The Indonesian Army, led by hotheaded young General Soedirman, continues to snipe at units of the 92,000 Dutch troops under Lieut. General S. H. Spoor. Actually, in Java the Dutch hold only three small areas: the cities of Surabaya, Semarang and a corridor two to six miles wide connecting and including Batavia and Bandung. Of Java's 51,000 square miles, the Dutch hold perhaps 380 square miles. In Sumatra the Dutch control three areas (at Palembang, Padang and Medan), less than 76 square miles out of 164,147.
In the interior, life goes on as if the Dutch would never come again. Recently a highly respected Dutch educator, P. J. Koets, shocked Holland with a realistic report of stability and progress in the nationalist area. Wrote Koets: "The picture in general is of a society consolidating itself, and not in the course of dissolution. . . . What struck me was the quiet and peacefulness. The farmer is busy on the farm, the women planting or harvesting, the people gathered at the market place, peddlers with heavy loads along the roads, the dogtrot of the carrier with his load on his back, a merchant on his way to the next village. . . . I had a long talk with a Republican leader whom I'd known in Holland. He used the comparison with water in the course of freezing. Consolidation, he said, is like water that freezes on top; there are large stretches where one can walk over in safety because the ice is thick and strong. There are parts where one can walk, but hear the threatening sound of cracking, and there are sections where only a thin skin of ice is forming, and over the deepest spots there are still open cracks. But the process of freezing continues, consolidation is progressing."