He said it was against his experience.

He did not believe that, for the sake of keeping warm, men would chance being killed.
But the incident was quite characteristic.

In times of war you constantly see men, and women, too, who, sooner than suffer discomfort or even inconvenience, risk death.

The psychology of the thing is, I think, that a man knows very little about being dead but has a very acute knowledge of what it is to be uncomfortable.

His brain is not able to grasp death but it is quite capable of informing him that his fingers are cold.