Posting this so as not to clog up the daily action reports. Trying to get definition of difference between skirmish and affair. This is what I have come up with: Of the various terms applied to Civil War military actions, "skirmish" denoted a clash of the smallest scope. In general, a skirmish was a limited combat, involving troops other than those of the main body; more specifically, a skirmish denoted an encounter between opposing skirmish lines, composed of troops assigned to protect the head and/or flanks of an army in motion, when some troops from the main body participated the fight was known as an engagement. A military engagement is a combat between two forces, neither larger than a division and not smaller than a company, in which each has an assigned or perceived mission. . So the scale seems to be skirmish, engagement, affair, battle.?
Affair seems to fit somewhere between engagement and battle.
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