On the other hand, events are clearly connected with the will of the leaders. We see that when Napoleon commands, thousands of men march into Russia. To show how"power" is expressed in the relationship between leaders and followers and the conditions under which the leader's will operates — or fails to operate — Tolstoy uses the structure of the military as a working model. His examination concludes that the men issuing the most orders are the farthest removed from the action they are ordering, while those directly involved in the action are the least responsible for directing it. He has already illustrated this principle during the war scenes in the body of his novel.
Tolstoy also examines the kind of power a commander has over the men he commands; it is either moral power or physical power, he says. The physical strength of a leader can only be effective on a small number of men, whereas moral power extends the leader's control to a larger group. Yet history offers many examples of weak and ineffectual leaders who still control the destinies of the men they lead.
Having failed to reveal how the power of a commander is transmitted to his followers, and having failed to describe the nature of this power, Tolstoy adds another argument to discredit the concept of power — the factor of time. Since human beings, he begins, operate within time, and events change according to time; a command can only cover a specific time sequence. Moreover, the commander himself is always in the middle of an event as it unfolds and he can never control all aspects of the event. Tolstoy shows how, out of all the commands given to cover the various conditions of any event, only those that are possible to be carried out will be carried out. No command can produce an event that is not ready to be enacted.
