Written by Frederick Engels about 10 August 1857 and published unsigned in The New American Cyclopaedia. A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana, vol. I (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1858), p. 7. Text of the Cyclopaedia, from the public-domain scan in the Internet Archive (newamericancycl23danagoog), with the OCR corrected against the page images; collated paragraph by paragraph with the German version in Marx/Engels, Werke, vol. 14 (Berlin, 1961), p. 83, and found complete. Traducción al español
ABATIS, or Abattis, in military strategy, a bulwark made of felled trees, in frequent use in rude mountain warfare. On emergency, the trees are laid lengthwise, with the branches pointed outwards to repel the invaders, while the trunks serve as a breastwork for the defendants. When the abatis is deliberately employed as the means of defending a mountain pass, for instance, the boughs of the tree are stripped of their leaves and pointed, the trunks are embedded in the ground, and the branches interwoven, so as to form a sort of chevaux de frise.