I saw this and wrote of it. A friend refused to credit
it. 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. Often men receive credit for showing coolness and
courage in times of danger when, in reality, they are not properly
aware of the danger and through habit are acting automatically. The
girl in Chicago who went back into the Iroquois Theatre fire to rescue
her rubber overshoes was not a heroine. She merely lacked
imagination. Her mind was capable of appreciating how serious for
her would be the loss of her overshoes but not being burned alive. At
the battle of Velestinos, in the Greek-Turkish War, John F.
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