Chapter 7
While Anna Pavlovna and Prince Vasili are doing the 1812 equivalent of rolling their eyes, the French were getting closer and closer to Moscow. Tolstoy uses a chess metaphor here, pointing out that a chess player will carefully examine, in hindsight, the one mistake which their opponent took advantage of to defeat them, but not all the other mistakes they made, which might also have lead to defeat. War is more complicated because so many more free wills are involved.
Anyway, basically, lots of things lead to the French and Russian armies meeting at Moscow, when neither actually intended to. These things included the capture of Lavrushka, Nikolai's valet, by the French. The French make the mistake of taking his words too seriously.
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