Human endurance is staggering, both as individuals and as a collective
Siege warfare.
Every civilization has a grasp on military actions to one degree or another. It's almost unheard of for any save for the most utopian gardenworlders to not have a history shaped by conflict.
Skirmishes, extended front lines, major offensives, charges, artillery, even WMDs. Everyone is familiar with such and many more related concepts in theory and practice. Too much practice for some...
What Humanity introduced to us through their history was, at first, simply an extension of certain realities of what war can be. Then the same individual battles in their past continued. On and on. Page after page, book after book. Some lasted for months, even years before any kind of resolution.
Constant engagement and casualties, seemingly with no regard for the lives of the individuals doing the fighting. Because as a collective they either decided or, more commonly by orders or circumstance, were forced to accept a new reality of suffering and death.
And the Humans learn to bear with it, even embrace it. Even laugh at it, for what else is there left. The survivors are forever changed, certainly, yet fundamentally most maintain their humanity, many even gain a sort of heightened perception and understanding of what it means to be alive at all.
Soldiers and civilians alike are not spared the horrors in Human wars, how could they be? There is barely any period pre-first contact where some part of Earth wasn't burning.
Certain conflicts stand out sharply, which is quite a morbid achievement, most notably to us any that have Humans fighting roughly in the same place for extended periods of time. We can barely imagine how a battle could last more than a few hours, let alone weeks and more. Wars can go on for decades and centuries, that is not new to us, but to endure the stress of an active battlefield for so long... the physical and mental fortitude required for that is something seemingly only Humans have in abundance.
However, what staggers us most are the first hand witness accounts of such battles. The full spectrum of Human emotion is on full display there - hope and desperation, love and hate, disgust and apathy, fear and amusement. There are countless stories of individual bravery and cowardice, ingenuity and obstinance, sacrifice and abandonment.
Yet the most staggering fact is that they are still here to tells us those stories themselves. Individually they all come from such pasts, but as a whole they manage to keep moving on despite everyone holding within them such pain. These stories are how they share the pain, and Human communities can withstand near limitless amounts of individual torment by supporting one another, even when each is already suffering beyond imagining. It is no wonder then that Humanity managed to survive and thrive even after turning their world into a Deathworld among Deathworlds.
Woe is be to any who incur the ire of Humanity. Their enduring patience will outlast any should brutal swiftness prove insufficient.
