Vimy by Pierre Berton

Author:Pierre Berton [Berton, Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-67361-7
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2001-10-09T07:00:00+00:00

3

Completing the arsenal of howitzers, guns, and mortars was the deadliest weapon of all – the one that had transformed warfare. The heavy, water-cooled Vickers machine gun and the more portable Lewis, with its cylindrical feed drum, spewing out bullets at rates that could exceed five hundred rounds a minute, had mechanized the science of killing. They dominated the battlefield. The firepower of each weapon exceeded that of a platoon of riflemen. Until the tank was invented nothing could stand up to machine-gun fire. Men were torn in two by its hail of bullets. Entire sections dropped like grain before the scythe. But it took a long time for the High Command to understand this truth.

The British thought of the machine gun as a kind of super rifle. It took the Canadians to demonstrate at Vimy that it could also be employed as light artillery. The man behind this innovation was another adopted Canadian, whose unorthodox views and keen mind had been honed on the frontier of the Canadian North West.

Raymond Brutinel, a twenty-three-year-old reservist in the French Army, had emigrated to Edmonton in 1905. For several years he roamed the West from Pembina to Fort Macleod, from the Skeena to the Peace. He was an explorer, a prospector, a land developer during the great boom, and, on occasion, a newspaper editor. In that yeasty era, Brutinel amassed a fortune. By 1914, still in his early thirties, he was living the life of a millionaire businessman in Montreal.

In his photograph, Brutinel looks as if Central Casting had sent him into the lines to play a comic Frenchman. With his neat little moustache, his pince-nez, his snapping eyes, and his smallish but definitely Cyranoesque nose, he is a caricature of an officer. In reality, he was a dedicated and dynamic figure who saw in the machine gun possibilities that others had overlooked.

One of the remarkable features of the 1st Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade, which Brutinel commanded, was that it was raised and underwritten largely by private money. Some of Canada’s biggest industrialists footed the bill. It’s significant that all were self-made millionaires, that most had had frontier experience, and that none had had a previous military background. They included Herbert Holt, the former CPR mountain contractor, J.R. Booth, the Ottawa lumberman, Clifford Sifton, the Western politician, J.W. McConnell, the Montreal broker, and, later, John Craig Eaton, the Toronto merchant, and “Klondike Joe” Boyle, the Yukon mining magnate. Boyle, for instance, raised an entire battalion of Klondikers, paid for it himself, and brought it out of the Yukon at his own expense. The least Sam Hughes could do was to make him an honorary colonel. Boyle, who went on to further adventures in Russia and Rumania, had his maple leaf lapel badges fashioned out of pure Klondike gold.

As a result of this remarkable demonstration of faith in the new weapon, and thanks to Brutinel’s importuning, Canada entered the war with a machine-gun arsenal stronger than that of the British. In England, however, Brutinel met with incredible resistance.

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