Written by Frederick Engels on January 7, 1858, and published unsigned in The New American Cyclopaedia, edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana (New York, D. Appleton and Co.), vol. IV (1859), p. 314. Text of the Cyclopaedia from the public-domain scans in the Internet Archive (newamericancycl10danagoog), read by OCR and corrected against the page images; collated paragraph by paragraph with the German version in Marx/Engels, Werke, vol. 14 (Berlin, 1961), pp. 232-233, and found complete; authorship after the Werke. Traducción al español
CAMPAIGN. This term is very often used to denote the military operations which are carried on during a war within a single year; but if these operations take place on 2 or more independent seats of war, it would be scarcely logical to comprise the whole of them under the head of one campaign. Thus what may be loosely called the campaign of 1800 comprises 2 distinct campaigns, conducted each quite independently of the other: the campaign of Italy (Marengo), and the campaign of Germany (Hohenlinden). On the other hand, since the almost total disuse of winter quarters, the end of the year does not always mark the boundary between the close of one distinct series of warlike operations and the commencement of another. There are nowadays many other military and political considerations far more important in war than the change of the seasons. Thus each of the campaigns of 1800 consists of 2 distinct portions: a general armistice extending over the time from July to September divides them, and although the campaign of Germany is brought to a close in Dec. 1800, yet that of Italy continues during the first half of Jan. 1801. Clausewitz justly observes that the campaign of 1812 does evidently not end with Dec. 31 of that year, when the French were still on the Niemen, and in full retreat, but with their arrival behind the Elbe in Feb. 1813, where they again collected their forces, the impetus which drove them homeward having ceased. Still, winter remaining always a season during which fatigue and exposure will, in our latitudes, reduce active armies at an excessive rate, a mutual suspension of operations and recruiting of strength very often coincide with that time of the year; and although a campaign, in the strict sense of the word, means a series of warlike operations closely connected together by one strategetical plan and directed toward one strategetical object, campaigns may still in most cases very conveniently be named by the year in which their decisive actions are fought.