Tire tracks disturb veterans’ graves
Winter damage will be fixed: cemetery
When she visited the cemetery last weekend, Shirley Elgar-Murdock was astonished to see muddy tire tracks in the field, showing a truck had driven over some gravestones, including her parents’.
“It is supposed to be the Field of Honour, but that was no honour, them doing this,” Elgar-Murdock said, her voice cracking with emotion. “I feel terrible that someone could do this.”
Her father, Herbert Elgar, was in one of the first Canadian units to fight in the Second World War. He went overseas when Elgar-Murdock was 5 years old and returned at the end of the war, when she was 11.
Elgar-Murdock visits Pointe-Claire’s Field of Honour — a cemetery for war veterans and their families — at least three times a year — on her parents’ birthdays and Remembrance Day — and sometimes at Easter.
Every time she goes, she places a Canadian flag and American flag on the gravestone of her parents, because her mother, Anna Aitken, was born in the U.S.
When she visited Saturday, she saw the tire tracks, and noticed several gravestones appeared to have been moved by the vehicle that drove over them, including that of her parents. The cemetery doesn’t have large headstones. Each soldier, regardless of rank, is buried with a small rectangular stone.
The tire marks departed from the main road into the cemetery, and drove over two lines of gravestones, ending near a hydro pole.
“It’s always so well kept; that’s why I was so shocked to see this,” she said. “The stones are all supposed to be in a line, and you can see now that some of them are out of place.”
One of the stones that had clearly been moved had a hole in the ground where it used to sit.
“I don’t know why they couldn’t have driven on either side of the stones, instead of running them over,” Elgar-Murdock said.
She said she contacted the Last Post Fund, which manages the cemetery, and was told the groundskeepers would correct the situation in three or four weeks.
Elgar-Murdock said that’s not good enough.
The veterans who served for Canada deserve better treatment, she said.
When reached on Wednesday, cemetery manager Serge Gélinas said the damage happened after a January storm caused a tree branch to sever a power line on the western edge of the graveyard.
He called in a crew to repair the wire that provides power to the whole cemetery. The ground was covered in snow, and it was difficult for the truck to see the stones, Gélinas said.
“They had to drive right through that area, during the winter,” Gélinas said. “Because the ground wasn’t frozen, the truck got stuck, and the truck was spinning its wheels a bit. We were aware there was a chance the ground would be damaged. But we had no choice.”
During summer months, Gélinas said, if crews have to repair a wire, they are supposed to drive between the stones so they don’t run them over.
“But in the wintertime, it’s not always possible to do this.”
Gélinas said he has received several complaints from relatives of people buried in the cemetery about the tire marks. He said crews intend on repairing the ground, but have not been able to start because the ground is so wet.
“We’ll repair the ground; we’ll put the stones back in line, and we’ll fix any stones if any of them broke,” he said.