Thread by @PapalZouaveInt

On this day 158 years ago, Aug. 20, 1867. The 6th Company of the 2nd Battalion of the Pontifical Zouaves were given honors for saving the townspeople of Albano during a Cholera outbreak earlier that summer🇻🇦🧵

The outbreak took many lives including Cardinal Altieri,

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the Queen Mother of Naples, her youngest son, and two Dutch Zouaves.

When the company first reached the town, bodies littered the town square. The mayor of the town and most of the residents had fled. The Papal Zoauves were left almost entirely alone to care for the sick.

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Lt. Resimont, the commander of the Papal Zouave company was the first to pick up a corpse and carry it to the cemetery. He called out to his men:

“I set the example; those who want to work with me stay here, those who don't feel up to it go back to the barracks.”

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No one left, impressed by this heroism, they imitated their leader and spent the night caring for the sick and burying the dead.

Pvt. Wibaux writing about the Albano Cholera outbreak said:

"Worthy indeed of admiration was the sight to be seen in Albano at that time,

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namely heroic charity spending and being spent amid scenes of horror and death. Those amongst the inhabitants who were not struck down by the scourge, fled from it in hot haste...the sick, who, left to them selves, lay helpless in the deserted habitations;

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whilst unburied corpses, some of them nearly naked, and in an advanced state of decomposition, were to be seen in the empty houses and even in the public thoroughfares.

In the midst of this dire confusion beneath a scorching sun, and in an atmosphere laden with pestilence,

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the soldiers of Pius IX divided amongst them the work which had to be done. Some took up their post in the cemetery, where by day and by night they were occupied in digging graves and burying the dead, 90 corpses being brought to them in the course of the first night.

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Those Zouaves who remained in the town were incessantly engaged in caring for some hundreds of sufferers; they undressed them, waited on them, rubbed them, assisted them to die like Christians, and it might have been thought they had spent their lives in nursing the sick.

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Two of the Zouaves, natives of Holland, caught the dire disease from carrying on their shoulders corpses in a state of putrefaction, and expired within 24 hours, full of joy One of them, Henri Peters, had not even straw to lie upon,

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but in the crucifix he found abundant consolation amid all his sufferings. Holding it in his hands, he forgot earth and its sorrows; with his dying lips he kissed it fervently, and exclaiming:

'I know that Heaven is before me when all this is past'

he peacefully expired"

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After the outbreak subsided on Aug 20, in the presence of the whole town, the Minister of War General Kanzler and Papal Zouave Lieutenant Colonel de Charette awarded Lt. de Resimont the Cross of Pius IX. Tears filled his eyes as he was awarded this great honor.

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The company SGM. was made a Knight of St. Gregory and two other Sergeants Knights of St. Sylvester. 36 Privates were awarded the Benemerenti medal.

The citizens of Albano honored the two Dutch Zouaves who died. They put a plaque in their cemetery where they were buried.

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The plaque reads:

"To the Glorius memory of the Dutch
Vander Meyden
Peters
Van Ophem
Pontifical Zouaves
That in the Cholera invasion
In the year 1867
Fell victim to Heroic Charity
Grateful Albano"

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Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception,
Ora pro nobis!

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