To accomplish such a result the Director of Finance, in whose hands eventually centered all the finance activities of the War Department, swept aside hampering regulations and precedents and adopted the direct methods of business. This impatience of red tape was not better shown than in the treatment of wounded men in the American hospitals. The regulations were hard and fast in adherence to the rule that a soldier could be paid only upon the representations of facts as written into his service records. Wounded men, however, picked up unconscious on the battle field, often too sick for months thereafter to look out for their personal affairs, in thousands of instances had lost their service records altogether. The matter came to a focus in early 1919 when the finance officer at Walter Reed Hospital at Washington reported that there were nearly a thousand patients in that institution who possessed no records at all to show what the Government owed them. The Director of Finance thereupon issued instructions that they and all other wounded men in the domestic hospitals should be paid off on the basis of their sworn affidavits setting forth the amounts owed to them by the Government. The finance officer at Walter Reed Hospital collected the affidavits, but, feeling his personal responsibility, hesitated to certify the pay roll; whereupon the Director of Finance showed his courage by certifying it himself, thus setting a precedent which the hospital officers were willing to follow. That was one departure from tradition. A more important one, because it concerned more men, did away with the individual final statements which all soldiers in the past had been required to make when coming up for discharge. The final statement was an elaborate form which each soldier filled out, at the cost of considerable time and effort. Moreover, the pay officers could not work rapidly from these forms. For them was substituted the final-payment roll which served for an entire company of men and which could be made up quickly by the company officers. Working with individual final statements, a certain demobilization center had been able to discharge four hundred men a day. As soon as the final-payment roll was adopted the same crew at the same camp was able to discharge men at the rate of fifteen hundred a day. The men who paid off the demobilized troops at the camps were trained for the work in a finance service school established immediately after the armistice at Camp Meigs, in the District of Columbia. The school graduated some 250 experts in army camp finance. These men were distributed among the demobilization centers, working in teams of two men each. For a long time the work of discharging the Army kept these teams at work from dawn until late at night, with never even a Sunday as holiday. [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ OVERSEAS TROOPS ENTRAINING AT HOBOKEN] [Illustration: _Felix J. Koch Photo_ VETERANS DETRAINING AT CAMP SHERMAN]