Yet another factor played an important part in increasing discontent at the front. One can say, without fear of intelligent contradiction, that no other country ever possessed as highly trained and efficient officers as Germany at the outbreak of the war. There were martinets among them, and the discipline was at best strict, but the first article of their creed was to look after the welfare of the men committed to their charge. Drawn from the best families and with generations of officer-ancestors behind them, they were inspired by both family and class pride which forbade them to spare themselves in the service of the Fatherland. The mortality in the officer-corps was enormous. About forty per cent of the original officers of career were killed, and a majority of the rest incapacitated. The result was a shortage of trained men which made itself severely felt in the last year of the war. Youths of eighteen and nineteen, fresh from the schools and hastily trained, were made lieutenants and placed in command of men old enough to be their fathers. The wine of authority mounted to boyish heads. Scores of elderly German soldiers have declared to the writer independently of each other that the overbearing manners, arbitrary orders and arrogance of these youths aroused the resentment of even the most loyal men and increased inestimably the discontent already prevailing at the front. CHAPTER VI. Propaganda and Morale. Even before the anti-war and revolutionary propaganda had attained great proportions there were indications that all was not well in one branch of the empire's armed forces. Rumblings of discontent began to come from the navy early in the second year of the war, and in the summer of 1916 there was a serious outbreak of rioting at Kiel. Its gravity was not at first realized, because Kiel, even in peace times, had been a turbulent and riotous city. But a few months later the rioting broke out again, and in the early summer of 1917 there came a menacing strike of sailors and shipyard and dock laborers at Wilhelmshaven. This was mainly a wage-movement, coupled with a demand for more food, but it had political consequences of a serious nature.