But how could Shidewa have understood? Before the elves arrived, all the trolls in the Hinterlands had lived by hunting, gathering, and robbery.
To them, war was merely another form of robbery. They stole not only money, food, and women, but corpses as well. Yes, corpses, whether they belonged to their enemies or their own people, because corpses were food to them too.
To put it bluntly, war was nothing more than a massive collective raid for the trolls of the Hinterlands back then. At heart, they were a pack of bandits.
That was why troll raiding parties in the Hinterlands often started with just a hundred people from one village, then gradually swelled into a mighty force of thousands as they traveled through more villages and tribes.
Sometimes, after another fierce clash with the Witherbark trolls, neither side could even figure out what had sparked the fighting by the time the war ended. So who among these Vilebranch trolls would have thought to prepare a roster of combatants before setting out?
Apart from the Vilebranch trolls who had once lived in Jintha'Alor, now called Quel'Danil City, and had possessed a relatively organized, professional elite army, the Vilebranch trolls of the other tribes were essentially soldiers in wartime and civilians in peacetime.
And when they went out to fight, most were not rallied by someone invoking an official rank or title. Instead, the strongest and best fighters in each village took the lead, calling on friends to go raiding together.
The Vilebranch trolls of the Hinterlands had many tribes of varying sizes, each with its own chieftain. Generally, the villagers obeyed their tribe's chieftain, which gave them a certain degree of organization in battle.
The so-called Vilebranch troll camps were often the residences of tribal chieftains. Most chieftains chose to