Kriegsspieler of the Month - Karl Friedrich Ludwig Freiherr von Vincke (1800 - 1869)

by Jorit Wintjes

This month’s Kriegsspieler is another member of the initial inner circle of young officers around Reisswitz who in 1824 were involved in preparing the rules for the Kriegsspiel for publication; just as with Dannhauer Reisswitz also thanked von Vincke in his introduction. Vincke’s career was not as long as that of Dannhauer and one could be forgiven for assuming that once he had left the army he faded into oblivion. However, Vincke not only had a successful career as a parliamentarian following his military service but also became a confidant of the later king Wilhelm I and, in a somewhat strange twist of events, also crossed the path of Bismarck, as Dannhauer had done - only that in the case of Vincke it involved a pistol duel.

Born in 1800 in Minden as the son of the Prussian judge Franz Friedrich Ernst August von Vincke. Vincke entered Prussian military service in 1817, joining the artillery. He soon showed promise and was educated at the Berlin Kriegsschule, where he made acquaintance with the then crown prince Wilhelm; three years his senior, the prince apparently got along well with Vincke. In 1824, fresh from the Kriegsschule, he was posted to the Trigonometrische Abteilung of the Prussian general staff which was responsible for carrying out surveys; he spent the next five years doing surveying work in the provinces of Silesia and Posen. Vincke must have joined the officers around Reisswitz during his time at the Kriegsschule, though it is unknown when and under what circumstances Vincke and Reisswitz met for the first time.

In 1829 Vincke was transferred from the Trigonometrische Abteilung to the general staff itself; three years later, after promotion to captain, he joined the staff of Sixth Army Corps in Breslau. He served for several years in Breslau before in 1837 his career took a decidedly adventurous turn. Together with two other captains, Friedrich Leopold Fischer (1798-1857) and Traugott Wilhelm Heinrich von Mühlbach (1795-1848) he was sent to the Ottoman empire as part of a fledgling Prusso-Ottoman military cooperation. Vincke and his fellow officers - after their arrival they were joined by another Prussian army captain, Helmuth von Moltke, who had already been in the country for about a year - formed the first Prussian military mission to the Ottoman empire; due to his seniority Vincke was in charge of the group.

While the general purpose of the mission was to assist the Sultan in his attempted modernization of the Turkish army, among the first specific tasks of the group was an inspection of the state of Turkish defences on the Danube as well as a survey of the area where a canal from the Danube to the Black Sea bypassing the Delta was planned, both of which they undertook in the autumn of 1837. Vincke and his fellow officers found the state of the Turkish defences lacking and the topography unsuitable for building a canal; however, their journey also took them to the ancient battlefield of Adamclissi, where in the winter of AD 101/102 emperor Trajan defeated a combined army of Dacians and Sarmatians. Some years later he had a massive monument built on the site of the battle, the so-called tropaeum Traiani; although very substantial remains were still visible when the Prussian officers inspected the site, no modern traveller had ever written about the structure. Vincke conducted a survey of the monument and published a detailed description after his return (K. F. L. von Vincke. 1840. “Das Karassu-Thal zwischen der Donau unterhalb Rassowa und dem schwarzen Meere bei Küstendschi”. Monatsberichte über die Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin 1, 179-186), which marks the very beginning of scholarly research into the tropaeum Traiani.

The tropaeum Traiani as it would have appeared to 19th c. visitors (after Tocilesco, G.G. et al. 1895. Das Monument von Adamklissi - Tropaeum Traiani. Wien: Alfred Hoelder, p. 1.

Easily the high point of the military mission, at least as far as excitement was concerned, was the conflict between the Sultan and the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, who in the summer of 1838 declared himself independent from Ottoman rule. When the Sultan tried to attack Ali Pasha, his army was all but wiped out in the Battle of Nisib in June 1838. All Prussian officers were in some way or another involved in the disastrous Syrian campaign. While Helmuth von Moltke took part in the battle itself, Vincke was the first to inform the Sultan of the result. Eventually, in autumn 1839 the Prussian mission was called back, and in November 1839 Vincke arrived at Breslau. He was clearly seen as a capable and promising officer; a few months after his return he was promoted major and transferred to the staff of the Guards Corps in Berlin.

However, although Vincke seemed to be destined for a successful military career, he was only to spend barely three further years in uniform. In 1841 he acquired an estate in Silesia, and in 1843 he obtained extended leave to devote his time to the running of that estate, finally leaving the army at the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1850; Vincke had exchanged the life of an officer for that of a landowner. While the adventures of his military career were now over, his life remained interesting if not colourful. On the one hand Vincke soon developed an interest in politics, eventually serving as a member of the Prussian parliament from 1849 to 1854 and again from 1858 to his death in 1869; he was among the more notable liberals in parliament and published on the reform of provincial administration in Silesia. During his time in parliament, he crossed Bismarck’s path in 1852; Vincke’s cousin, Georg von Vincke, another liberal politician and an outspoken critic of Bismarck, had challenged the latter for a pistol duel after a particularly heated exchange in parliament. As a result, Vincke found himself on a clear spring morning in 1852 besides Lake Tegel, acting as his cousin’s second; both opponents fired and missed, and honour was deemed to be restored.

Easily the most significant episode in Vincke’s life out of uniform however began shortly after his acquisition of the estate in Silesia, when he again made the acquaintance of the crown prince; although the latter was noted for his ultra-conservative views, resulting in him earning the not-entirely-flattering nickname Kartätschenprinz (“case shot prince”) in 1848, their relationship was apparently one of genuine trust. What was possibly the darkest episode in the biography of crown prince Wilhelm is evidence to that: when forced by his brother, king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, to leave Berlin for Russia in the wake of the revolution of 1848, Vincke not only provided his own cloths and boots so Wilhelm could leave the palace unobserved, he also suggested to the prince to go to England instead of Russia. He remained in contact with the prince and seems to have been instrumental in persuading Wilhelm to publicly declare his support for the Prussian constitution before his return to Berlin in summer 1849. He continued to have a close relationship to the prince, and it is said that twenty years later, Wilhelm, now king, grieved at the new of Vincke’s death.

Vincke’s importance for the history of the Kriegsspiel itself and the understanding of that history is twofold. While one might assume that he was only a minor figure, his mentioning in the preface to the 1824 ruleset not only shows that Reisswitz clearly valued his contribution, looking closer at the circumstances of that publication reveals that Reisswitz himself, who spent much of 1824 in Russia, is unlikely to have taken part significantly in the actual publication process; rather, it seems that it was mainly due to the efforts of Vincke, Dannhauer and Gustav von Griesheim, who will feature in the next instalment of Kriegsspieler of the Month, that the 1824 ruleset was published in time. Vincke will also have taken part in the revision of the rules undertaken in the winter of 1827/28 resulting in the supplement published in 1828, although he is not explicitly mentioned in this context.

Apart from his role in the publication and presumably also in the development of the Kriegsspiel, his professional background also serves to highlight a key issue in the early history of the Kriegsspiel: its attraction for technically-minded officers, often younger and open to progress, which, or so it seems, went along with considerable scepticism among more traditional officers, in particular among those old enough to have gained combat experience in the Napoleonic wars. Like Reisswitz and Dannhauer, Vincke was an artillery officer, and all three were specifically involved in work of a scientific or technological, for want of a better word, nature. Reisswitz was involved with collecting data from test firings, Dannhauer was an instructor at the school for artillery and engineering as well as involved in making maps, while Vincke was doing survey work. For them, the Kriegsspiel as a true simulation of combat played on a topographical map was yet another way of getting a scientific handle on war. The Kriegsspiel, at least in its 1824 incarnation, basically depicted Napoleonic warfare which in itself was far from innovative and indeed by the early 1840s starting to undergo dramatic change; conceptually, however, it was something entirely new, and going by the background of most of the early Kriegsspielers it is obvious that they understood the Kriegsspiel to be essentially another new technology applicable to the art of war.

There is no in-depth study on Vincke extant; apparently no papers are surviving, yet while his military career was significantly shorter than that of Dannhauer, ample material from Vincke’s activities after he had left the army survives in published sources from the time, most importantly perhaps in the letters of king Wilhelm I. A brief overview by Hermann von Petersdorff can be found in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (H. von Petersdorff. 1895. “Vincke-Olbendorf, Karl Freiherr von”. ADB 39, 756-760). Given his eventful life both in and out of uniform - and realizin that pretty much the same statement can be found in last month’s instalment on Dannhauer - an in-depth study of his biography would definitely be worth the while.

So much for this month’s Kriegsspieler. Next month we will conclude the coverage of the inner circle around Reisswitz by looking at Gustav von Griesheim, whose biography shows interesting similarities to that of Vincke. For more on him see next month’s installment of Kriegsspieler of the Month.