World War: CASUALTIES: Bruno’s Last Flight

Benito Mussolini hates death. He wants perpetual strength for his own body, for his loved ones, for his Italy. Withering and dying hurt him.

After his Brother Arnaldo died, he wrote: “For his death I have sorrowed and shall sorrow for long; like the mutilations of the body, those of the soul are irreparable.” One morning last week Benito Mussolini, whose soul has lately been scarred almost beyond recognition, was at his desk in Rome. A few minutes after 10 o’clock, the telephone rang. San Giusto Airport, Pisa. An accident. Three killed, five injured. And one of the dead was Benito Mussolini’s second boy Bruno; Bruno, the brown one, the good flyer.

With Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Francesco Pricolo, Benito Mussolini flew at once to Pisa. There, being Duce as well as padre, he marched in stately review, head high, past the pilots and ground crews of San Giusto. Then he went to Santa Chiara Hospital, and stood a long time beside the boy’s body.

He remembered the day when he pinned gold wings on Bruno’s chest to make him, at 17, the youngest pilot in Italy. He remembered what the generals said about how the lad acquitted himself on bombing missions in Ethiopia. He remembered the speed records, the flight to Brazil. He remembered the necessity of recalling him from the Balearics during the Spanish war, because the Reds seemed to be gunning for the boy. This son was the real flyer. It was Vittorio, not Bruno, who made a spectacle of himself describing bombs as “budding roses,” killing as “exceptionally good fun”; this boy Bruno understood the air, and lived dangerously.

Too dangerously. Now, only 23, he had broken himself test-piloting a big new four-motored bomber.

Benito Mussolini left the hospital, went back to the field, and stared for a time at the scene of the crash. Then he returned to the bedside and sat there all night. The others quietly joined him: Donna Rachele, his own wife, a strong woman who opposed Bruno’s flying; Vittorio, not such a good flyer, only a lieutenant while Bruno, nearly two years his junior, was a captain; Edda Ciano, the girl, who had very nearly been killed by British flyers during the Balkan fight. Bruno’s pretty wife Gina was also there. The other Mussolinis—Anna, Maria and Romano, mere schoolchildren—were too young for this vigil.

In the morning came the Pope’s blessing on this agnostic ex-Socialist father and a brief service for the son. Then the coffin, buried pro tempore under wreaths, was taken off to be buried under the soil of Predappio, on one of the little Romagna hillsides where the Mussolinis, the makers of muslin, had always lived. But before he left Pisa, Benito Mussolini went to talk with the five injured survivors. One unwittingly asked how Bruno was.

“Bruno,” said Benito Mussolini, who hates death, “is quite well. He is no longer in danger.”