War reconfigures time as well as space. Conflict calls forth an increase in temporal expressions: ‘for the duration’, ‘never again’, ‘back by Christmas’. If the war zone demands a special topography, wartime demands a bespoke narratology, or even, given the importance to it of (lack of) endings, a bespoke eschatology or theology. Wartime is twofold: both the duration of a conflict and how time is experienced within it. Defining the former and characterising the latter are both problematic. To ascribe a start and an end to a conflict is to emplot it, and emplotment is the beginning of interpretation and hence controversy (a point Tolstoy makes repeatedly in his examples of events being quickly rendered into historical accounts). Frank Kermode analyses emplotted time using the simple model of a clock's tick-tock:

Wartime, in its exceptional fashion, diverges from this. It is both chronos and kairos; moreover, its kaironic qualities are brought about as much by an absence of ending as by a definitive conclusion.