Pretty nearly as frequent as this was confinement to barracks. This comes next in the scale of punishments and is always connected with "salle de police." Salle de police is only another name for the general cells in the prisons. Above all the offenders are not allowed to leave the barracks in their spare time. In other respects they do their duty as usual. When their day's work is finished, however, at five o'clock, they are called out every half-hour and sometimes every quarter of an hour to the drill-ground, where their names are called over by the sergeant of the guard. Any one who happens to miss one of these roll-calls finds himself in prison for a week. In their fear of not hearing the signal the men have not a single minute's quiet, and can hardly find time to clean their kit for the morrow. At nine o'clock, at the evening roll-call, they must report themselves in the guard-room, and are shut up in the salle de police for the night--in the general cells, which are filled to overflowing. Sleep among the crush of men and in that nauseating atmosphere is only possible for a few hours, when the tired body demands its right in spite of the disgusting surroundings. Next morning at five they are dismissed and have to perform the usual routine work with the rest of the company. Eight days' "salle de police" are looked upon as a very light punishment--a sure sign that the average légionnaire's susceptibilities are not all too fine. Salle de police was something quite in the ordinary run of affairs for us: confinement to barracks was a part of life in the Legion. In our quarters I was the only man who had not made its acquaintance, and that was the merest chance, luck plain and simple. No one excited himself about extra corvée and confinement to barracks. Every single man in the Legion had, however, a mighty respect for the prison. Prison, arrest in the regimental lock-up, is the Legion's real punishment. Imprisonment in the Legion is made up of the hardest work possible, and living under the most awful sanitary conditions; one can only form an idea of what this punishment is like when one has had a look at the Legion's prisons.[6] [6] See close of chapter. Next comes "cellule," solitary confinement on starvation diet. Then come the "Zephyrs," those condemned to the penal battalion. Every two or three weeks a transport of Zephyrs left the barracks in old ragged uniforms. In the battalion itself they have to wear the coffee-brown clothes of the convict.