Written by Frederick Engels about February 11, 1858, and published unsigned in The New American Cyclopaedia. A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana, vol. III (New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1858), p. 693. Text of the Cyclopaedia, from the public-domain scans in the Internet Archive (newamericancycl21danagoog, University of Wisconsin copy), with the OCR corrected against the page images; collated paragraph by paragraph with the German version in Marx/Engels, Werke, vol. 14 (Berlin, 1961), pp. 263-264, and found complete. The breaks that the Cyclopaedia marks with a dash inside the article are given as new paragraphs. Traducción al español
BRIDGE-HEAD, or Tête-de-pont, in fortification, a permanent or field work, thrown up at the farther end of a bridge in order to protect the bridge, and to enable the party holding it to manoeuvre on both banks of the river. The existence of bridge-heads is indispensable to those extensive modern fortresses situated on large rivers or at the junction of 2 rivers. In such a case the bridge-head is generally formed by a suburb on the opposite side and regularly fortified; thus, Castel is the bridge-head of Mentz, Ehrenbreitstein that of Coblentz, and Deutz that of Cologne. No sooner had the French got possession, during the revolutionary war, of Kehl, than they turned it into a bridge-head for Strasbourg. In England, Gosport may be considered the bridge-head of Portsmouth, although there is no bridge, and though it has other and very important functions to fulfil. As in this latter case, a fortification on the further side of a river or arm of the sea is often called a bridge-head, though there be no bridge; since the fortification, imparting the power of landing troops under its protection and preparing for offensive operations, fulfils the same functions, and comes, strategetically speaking, under the same denomination. In speaking of the position of an army behind a large river, all the posts it holds on its opposite bank are called its bridge-heads, whether they be fortresses, intrenched villages, or regular field-works, inasmuch as every one of them admits of the army debouching in safety on the other side. Thus, when Napoleon's retreat from Russia, in 1813, ceased behind the Elbe, Hamburg, Magdeburg, Wittenberg, and Torgau were his bridge-heads on the right bank of that river. In field fortification, bridge-heads are mostly very simple works, consisting of a bonnet à prêtre, or sometimes a horn-work or crown-work, open toward the river, and with a redoubt close in front of the bridge. Sometimes a hamlet, a group of farmhouses, or other buildings close to a bridge, may be formed into a sufficient bridge-head by being properly adapted for defence; for, with the present light-infantry tactics, such objects, when at all capable of defence, may be made to offer a resistance as great, or greater, than any field-works thrown up according to the rules of the art.