The narrator of the novel has always fascinated me; I’ve always felt as if Russia herself was the narrator. Tolstoy moves in and out of people’s heads so effortlessly and refers to the troops as ‘we’ and ‘our’ that there is no ‘person’ who narrates the novel, rather something much grander.

His word choices are genius, too. When speaking of one soldier, he uses the term ‘the fairer sex’ to describe that man’s ideas