A Portrait of Raymond Brutinel as a Young Man (Part II): The Future Canadian Corps Machine Gun Commander as a Business Entrepreneur in the Canadian West, 1908–1914

The following carries on from an article on Brutinel’s prewar life in Edmonton, Alberta that appeared in the previous issue of Canadian Military History. That account dealt with his arrival in Edmonton from France, the reasons for his immigration, and his adaptation to life in the newly-created Alberta capital. This included an initial involvement with the Edmonton French community, his editorship of the French language Le Courrier de l’Ouest, and his eventual breaking away from these pursuits into a career of business entrepreneurship. The following is specifically concerned with this latter phase of his career, in which, at the height of the ‘Laurier boom,’ he enjoyed great success. Included are his role as an agent for a syndicate of wealthy Montreal capitalists, his work as an explorer for coal deposits, and his promotion of numerous community development schemes, intended both to assist with community improvement and to earn money for his Montreal backers. These are recounted to clarify for the first time the kinds of activities that preoccupied Brutinel before the war and to help to illustrate his experiences and the capacities he developed and subsequently brought to his service as an officer with the Canadian Corps on the Western Front

A Portrait of Raymond Brutinel as a Young Man (Part I): The Future Machine Gun Commander in Edmonton, Alberta, 1905-1914

Raymond Brutinel remains one of the Canadian Corps’ most intriguing and little understood senior officers. A fair amount has been written about his service with the Canadian Corps, which generally portrays him as a significant commander and military innovator. But his life before he joined the Canadian military largely remains a mystery, which Brutinel himself did little to clear up. He had emigrated from France to Edmonton, Alberta in 1905 and lived there until the outbreak of war. Yet little is known in detail about this formative period of his life. Based largely upon Edmonton-based sources, the following aims to bring greater clarity to these crucial formative years than has been available before now. There is, in fact, little here of a specific military nature, which may itself be significant. But for the first time we have significant detail about what this background was. This in turn helps us to understand exactly the kind of experience, the personality, and the intellectual qualities that Brutinel brought to the job of Canadian Corps machine gun commander

Death at Licourt Revisited

New Information comes to light about the five fatalities that occurred in the 1st Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade on the River Somme on 25 March 1918, as discussed in an article published in 2002