The son of William and Ellen Dixon, Frank Percival Dixon was born on 16 April 1898 in Elkhorn, Manitoba, not far from the Saskatchewan border. Elkhorn's population today is under 500, roughly the same as it was back then. His parents were a farming couple. Frank, the family's fifth child, was one of eight children, Winona and Gertrude being the only girls.
Four days before the Christmas of 1916, Frank Dixon travelled to Winnipeg to enlist in the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force. He was eighteen at the time.
His first known poem was written three days later:
Two months after that, he provided a will, leaving everything to his mother.
The army life in Sackville,On 22 April 1917, Dixon arrived in Liverpool aboard the S.S. Canada.
Let me convince you all,
Is playing hide and seek with mumps,
And we'll play the game till fall.
One man gets the mumps and then
We stay here just to see
If there won't be another case
To get our sympathy.
Dixon wrote about this in the poem 'From Liverpool to Shorncliffe.' His overseas experiences inspired dozens of poems, many of them quite detailed. Consider the first stanza of 'An Air Raid in England,' written on 26 May 1917:
It was six twenty-five in the evening,The next month, he reached France:
On the twenty-fifth of May:
We were quietly enjoying the coolness
After a long and sultry day.
Come 1918, Dixon's views on the war had shifted. Romance had been replaced by rage, regret, realization, and cynicism:
"Home" is the most frequently used noun in Dixon's 1918 poems; the second is "mother":
On 29 August 1918, Frank Dixon succumbed to injuries received in combat. His remains lie in Ligny-St Flochel British Cemetery, Pas de Calais, France.
In 1937, as war clouds were again gathering over Europe, Frank's mother Ellen self-published a slim volume consisting of forty-five poems and fragments written by her son in the twenty months between the day he enlisted and the day he died.
In 1937, as war clouds were again gathering over Europe, Frank's mother Ellen self-published a slim volume consisting of forty-five poems and fragments written by her son in the twenty months between the day he enlisted and the day he died.
This is her foreword:
A mother's love.
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