It has been claimed that in the build-up to World War I, de Gaulle agreed with Pétain about the obsolescence of cavalry and of traditional tactics in the age of machine guns and barbed wire, and often debated great battles and the likely outcome of any coming war with his superior. Lacouture is sceptical, pointing out that although Pétain wrote glowing appraisals of de Gaulle in the first two-quarters of 1913, it is unlikely that he stood out among the 19 captains and 32 lieutenants under his command. De Gaulle would have been present at the 1913 Arras manoeuvres, at which Pétain criticised General to his face, but there is no evidence in his notebooks that he accepted Pétain's unfashionable ideas about the importance of firepower against the dominant doctrine emphasizing "offensive spirit". De Gaulle stressed how Maurice de Saxe had banned volley fire, how French armies of the Napoleonic period had relied on infantry column attack, and how French military power had declined in the nineteenth century because of – supposedly – excessive concentration on firepower (e.g. the Chassepot rifle) rather than "élan". He also appears to have accepted the then fashionable lesson drawn from the recent Russo-Japanese War, of how bayonet charges by Japanese infantry with high morale had succeeded in the face of enemy firepower.