Saniez was a Frenchman, a big, burly artilleryman, with eyes bright, laughing, and sympathetic.
He had been captured nearly two years before; and suffered severely from the effects of frozen feet. Yet, painful as it must have been to get about, he seldom sat down.
All through those long days and nights weak voices would call him: it was always, "Saniez, Saniez!" and slop, slop, slop, we would hear him in his slippered feet, moving down the ward, attending to one and then another.
Saniez would be quiet and sympathetic, with a voice soft and soothing; and the next moment, cheerful and boisterous. Captivity could not subdue Saniez, or make him anything else than a loyal French soldier.
He would guard his patients against the clumsy touch of a German orderly like a tiger guarding its young. He would bribe or steal to obtain a little delicacy for his patients.
He seemed to know but a single German word, which he used on every possible occasion to express his disgust of the Germans. It was a slang word, but when Saniez used it, its single utterance was a volume of expression. It was NIX, and when Saniez said nix, I knew he was shaking his woolly head in disgust.
Saniez had a marvellous voice, and when he sang he held us spell-bound, and he knew it. I do not speak French, and could not understand his words, but his expression was wonderful; and he would fling his arms about in frantic gesticulation.
When Saniez sang he seemed to lift himself into a different atmosphere; he was back again in France; his songs all seemed about his country and his home. He seemed to rouse himself into a sudden spirit of defiance, and then his voice would grow soft and pathetic; and then slop, slop, slop, in his slippered feet, he would hurry off to a bedside to fix a bandage or administer a drink of water.
Every morning German soldiers could be heard marching past our windows, singing their national songs. We listened; Saniez would stop his work. What we wanted to say we would leave to Saniez, as broom in hand and eyes of fire he would wait until their voices died away in the distance, and then, with a fierce shake of his head he would shout: "Boche! Nix!" and, flinging his arms about his head, would sing the "Marseillaise."
One evening, and I remember it well, though no pen of mine can adequately describe the soul-stirring picture—we had a concert in Ward 43. Four British and four French officers—a symbol of the Entente Cordiale—lay side by side in their cots, while convalescent prisoners from other wards sat in front to cheer them with song and music.