Free Fallen Angel by William Fotheringham

get himself ‘into hospital’ he would end up fighting. There were attempts to smuggle him to Switzerland, and Cavanna had offered to ‘make him ill’ to get him relieved of active service, using the combination of a strange concoction and a Tuscan cigar. He declined both offers. Coppi was willing to submit to something far larger than himself. He explained later that he felt if he evaded service, he would inevitably face public criticism. ‘Friends suggested ways out. I was against it. I would damage my career by going, but I would surely ruin it if I stayed.’ Moreover, Bruna backed his decision, in spite of the dangers he would run.
    The abortive campaign in the French colony of Tunisia wasthe last gasp of Mussolini’s attempt to recreate the Roman empire in North Africa. Coppi and his unit arrived in March 1943, by which time the Axis troops were clinging on to the Mareth Line, a string of French fortifications at the foot of the peninsula, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and were gradually being pushed into the sea by the Allies. The tone had been set for the ‘campaign’ when the colonel who sent Coppi and his unit to war accompanied them as far as the railway station, where he told them that duty dictated he himself remain in the barracks.
    They ‘skimmed the crests of the waves’ as they flew from Sicily, a memory which still terrified Coppi years later: it was the first time he had been in an aeroplane. From Biserta, at the head of the peninsula, Coppi sent Bruna a coded telegram: ‘Fausto is well, under the palm trees.’ A month later, in April, he wrote that he dreamt of meeting her. As for the fighting, he later described an army in which the soldiers had no belief they could win, and in which as many men were falling to illness as to enemy bullets. The news via the radio of massive bombardments at home merely discouraged them further: what would be left if they did ever get home?
    In spring 1943, Mussolini told Rommel that Tunisia was ‘the fortress of Europe and if it falls the European situation could change for good’. The troops on the ground knew defeat was imminent, however. ‘No one believed hostilities would end with victory for us,’ wrote Coppi. ‘Dysentery, lack of supplies, the bad news that the fascist propaganda couldn’t hide all combined to turn us into a defeated army. We retreated night and day across the desert after pulling back from the Mareth Line and were surrounded, out of ammunition, food and courage, when the English captured us.’
    The first two weeks of May saw a general collapse among the Axis troops, who retreated to the coast. Coppi was captured at Cape Bon on 13 April, just before the end of the entireTunisian campaign. The Italian troops had been cut off from their supply lines for forty-eight hours, with their commander alternately calling on the Madonna and screaming down a dead field telephone, his men firing into the air for something to do. Finally, one of Coppi’s comrades tapped him on the elbow and told him to stay still: the English had come. Luckily for him, his general had specified that he would only surrender to the inglesi . The French had already acquired a reputation for mistreating their Italian prisoners of war as a crude means of reprisal for the ‘stab in the back’. Almost sixty years later, Coppi’s former classmate Armando Baselica was still bitter about the way the French had treated him.
    In his prisoner-of-war camp at Megez-el-Bab, where about 10,000 prisoners gathered in a valley close to the top of the Tunisian peninsula, Coppi must have felt the same as Baselica did among the French: ‘[in the camps] you forget about the whole world. I didn’t know whether Castellania was still there, whether my girlfriend was alive. You know you are losing the best years of your life.’ There were lighter moments: the prisoners found a dog and adopted it as