Speaking with people, I find that the most touching episodes are those
concerning the babies.
How heart-rending the cry and screams must have been of the parents and
relatives who were trying to gather them, that they might take them
away, lifting in their arms the youngest, tying to their clothes the
largest, what a tearing cry must have been heard under the terrible
shower of burning stones, lappillus, and ashes! Many of these children,
got lost through the country in that dark night, their parents, not
finding them, but after three days at long distances, while for three
days, they believed them dead and wept desperately over them! The
boarders of Ateneo Chierchia ran out helping the younger ones, and
carried them on their shoulders wrapped in blankets that they might
not be wounded, and in these conditions they fled through the terrible
night. The soldiers who had come from Nola during the day gathered a
number of other children, and fed them, keeping them with them till
the following days, when they could be returned to their parents. As
for mothers, in that terrible flight, half wild with despair, they
wrapped the little ones in their dresses and shawls thus repairing
them from certain death. A poor lady, who had a four months old baby,
hid it under her arms, covered it with a basket, and thus carried it
for eleven miles, on foot, at night, the baby however quietly sleeping
under its shelter. The children of one of the teachers in Ottaiano,
took their father who was very ill, closed him in a kind of covered
box, and carried him so, on their shoulders till Caserta. The poor
man naturally died there of his former trouble, but his children can
say that they have saved him from dying under the stones of Ottaiano.
Strange to say in this flight of fourteen thousand persons, not one
single baby has died, and the people from Ottaiano say, that this is a
miracle of the Madonna, a true, real miracle, and every mother clasping
her child alive in her arms, has been obliged to believe in this
miracle.