While working for Pétain, de Gaulle also started to frequent the circle of Colonel Emile Mayer, forty years his senior.45 Mayer was a nonconformist military thinker whose promising military career ended in 1898 when he became the target of right-wing attacks for publishing articles in defence of Dreyfus. Forced out of the army, he became a prolific writer on military affairs, expressing heterodox, original (and often prescient) ideas on the nature of the next war.
