Re: Blood and Iron - Chapter 881: Compliance

Chapter 881: Compliance

The vote passed without ceremony.

There was no cheering in the chamber, no applause from the galleries, no sense of triumph to accompany the words that would dismantle nearly three centuries of imperial presence in the East Indies.

The Speaker read the result plainly, as if announcing a procedural adjournment rather than the quiet death of an empire’s last overseas possession.

The Decolonization Act was approved by a narrow margin.

And with it, the Netherlands formally accepted what had already been true for months: the Dutch East Indies could no longer be held.

Outside the Binnenhof, the winter air was cold and gray. The flags hung motionless, heavy with damp. Reporters waited for statements that did not come. Ministers exited in silence, coats pulled tight, expressions fixed somewhere between resignation and relief.

For years, Parliament had delayed this moment through language rather than action. Committees were formed.

Reports commissioned. Security assessments revised and re-revised. Every vote was postponed under the guise of “stability,” “responsibility,” or “the protection of colonial subjects.”

In truth, it had been fear.

Fear of humiliation.

Fear of admitting weakness.

Fear of acknowledging that the world which had allowed European powers to rule the globe by force had ended; not in one great collapse, but through a thousand quiet withdrawals.

The war had shattered the illusion of permanence.

The Netherlands had not mobilized as others had. It had survived, yes; but survival was not the same as relevance.

While greater empires burned themselves hollow in total war, or voluntarily withdrew from their possessions oversees after seeing the cost of development, the Dutch state had preserved its institutions by avoiding catastrophe rather than confronting it.

And now, in the aftermath, that restraint had become a liability.

Indonesia was no longer an anomaly.

Across Asia and Africa, the old colonial order was unraveling. British India was gone. French authority had vanished with the death of the Republic.

German territories; once thought the most rigidly controlled, had already undergone two decades of managed disengagement, their former colonies restructured into client states, protectorates, and contractual subordinates rather than administered possessions.

That transformation had not been cheap.

But it had been deliberate.

The German model; quietly discussed in European policy circles though rarely praised aloud, had avoided the kind of endless insurgency now plaguing the remaining colonial holdouts.

Infrastructure had been transferred, not destroyed. Local elites integrated, not purged. Security outsourced, not imposed.

Most importantly, the costs had been shifted.

Colonies that once drained the metropole had been reorganized to pay for their own stability.

It was a self-sustaining cycle of control without responsibility. One perfectly engineered after the principles Bruno had observed in his past life.

The Dutch had not done this, they had tried to wait.

By the time unrest in the Indies escalated beyond manageable protests, the calculus had already turned against them.

Garrison forces were stretched thin. Supply lines were expensive. International tolerance for colonial repression had evaporated in the moral vacuum left by the war.

Every month Parliament delayed, the price rose.

Until finally, there was no price left worth paying.

The Act authorized a phased withdrawal of Dutch military forces from the archipelago over eighteen months.

Administrative authority would be transferred to provisional local governments under international supervision.

Dutch corporate holdings would be renegotiated under new concession frameworks rather than outright nationalization, an attempt to salvage economic influence where political control had failed.

It was, in essence, an admission of defeat dressed in legal language.

In Batavia, the announcement arrived before dawn.

The Governor-General received the cable in his office, already awake, already resigned to the outcome. He had known this was coming long before The Hague allowed itself to say it aloud.

Reports from the interior had grown worse by the week. Loyalty was conditional. Cooperation transactional. Even the colonial police no longer pretended permanence.

The order was clear: Begin preparations.

Within days, Dutch units began consolidating toward major ports. Equipment was inventoried, prioritized, and, where transport capacity ran short, quietly transferred to local forces deemed “reliable.”

Files were destroyed while others were packed and sealed for archives no one was certain would ever be opened again.

Flags were lowered not in disgrace, but with bureaucratic precision.

Local leaders were summoned to meetings that felt less like negotiations and more like handovers of responsibility neither side fully trusted.

Indonesian representatives listened carefully, but they did not celebrate yet. They had seen other withdrawals turn into chaos.

But they also understood something the Dutch had only recently accepted: their neighbors were already free.

The Philippines. Burma. Indochina in flux. Across the region, the logic of empire had collapsed under its own weight.

Holding Indonesia alone made no sense. It could not be isolated, it could not be contained, and it could not be justified.

International observers arrived quickly; German economic envoys among them, officially neutral, unofficially curious.

They studied the process with interest, noting the inefficiencies, the missed opportunities, the absence of long-term planning.

This was decolonization as surrender, not transformation. Still, it was happening, and that mattered.

In The Hague, critics raged quietly in private salons and editorial columns. They spoke of betrayal, of cowardice, of abandoning civilizing missions and strategic depth. Some invoked history. Others invoked pride.

Few offered alternatives.

The Treasury figures were unforgiving. The military assessments worse. Even the most ardent imperialists could not ignore the reality that enforcing control would require a scale of violence the Dutch state was neither willing nor able to sustain.

And so the empire ended not with a war; but with paperwork.

Ships departed Rotterdam carrying soldiers home to a country that no longer expected them to hold distant shores. Some returned bitter. Others relieved. Most simply tired.

In Indonesia, the vacuum began to fill.

Local militias reorganized into proto-armies. Civil administrators drafted constitutions at breakneck pace. Foreign advisers whispered competing visions of the future; some promising sovereignty, others dependency dressed as partnership.

The Dutch were still present.

But no longer decisive.

In Berlin, the shift did not go unnoticed.

Analysts marked the vote as inevitable rather than surprising. The Netherlands had merely reached the conclusion others had arrived at years earlier.

The age of direct colonial administration was over; not because it was immoral, but because it was inefficient.

The future belonged to influence without ownership, to debt instead of garrisons; and to security contracts instead of imperial banners.

Bruno von Zehntner did not comment publicly. He was after all, in retirement, and enjoying a winter vacation in Constantinople with his wife, youngest daughter, and his grandchildren.

But those who understood the shape of the world he had helped build recognized the pattern immediately.

The Dutch had chosen belated withdrawal over managed transformation. They would pay for that hesitation; not in war, but in leverage.

Indonesia would be free. but not untouched.

And the Netherlands would discover, in time, that letting go too late often cost more than holding on too long.

By spring, the flags would be gone, and by winter of the following year, the empire would exist only in ledgers and memory.

And the world would continue on; indifferent, impatient, and already looking toward the next power willing to shape it.

—

The meeting did not take place in Batavia, nor in the jungle, nor anywhere a map would bother to remember.

It occurred instead in a modest warehouse office along the northern coast; close enough to shipping lanes to matter, far enough from colonial administration to be ignored.

The men seated there were not soldiers in uniform. They did not introduce themselves by rank or affiliation.

Across from them sat three Indonesian figures who represented different factions; nationalists, labor organizers, and one man whose militia had not yet fired a single shot at Dutch forces. All of them had expected promises.

What they received instead was information.

One of the Europeans; gray-haired, unremarkable, his accent deliberately softened, laid a thin folder on the table.

Inside were port schedules, garrison rotations, and names of officers whose families resided in Europe.

Financial records tracing colonial companies through banks that no longer answered to The Hague.

“No action is required,” the man said calmly. “In fact, action would be… inefficient.”

He closed the folder.

“The Netherlands is already withdrawing,” another added, this one younger, his eyes alert but bored. “Parliament will approve it. Publicly, it will be framed as restraint. Privately, they understand they no longer control the tempo.”

One of the Indonesians frowned.

“Then why are you here?”

The older man met his gaze without challenge.

“To ensure you do not accelerate events in ways that force unnecessary bloodshed.”

Silence followed.

Finally, the militia leader spoke.

“And if we ignore you?”

The response was immediate; not sharp, not threatening.

“Then nothing changes,” the younger European said. “Except that others, less disciplined and less patient, will take notice. The Dutch are not the only ones watching this transition.”

That was the moment it landed, this was not support, it was containment.

They were being told; politely, and professionally, that the war had already been won somewhere else, by people who had no intention of letting the aftermath spiral into chaos.

The folder was left behind when the Europeans departed.

No instructions, no demands, just proof.

Within weeks, Dutch commanders began receiving guidance from The Hague that no longer asked if control could be maintained; but how quickly it should be relinquished.

Resistance groups did not attack.

They did not need to. The threat was never violence, it was competence.

And the Dutch, reading the shape of the world correctly for once, chose the only remaining option that did not end in disaster.

They conceded.