Consider Dom Lambert Beauduin, previously noted as a World War I hero. This account is from a successor in the liturgical movement, Dom Bernard Botte, in his excellently readable, largely eyewitness account of the movement From Silence to Participation (Pastoral Press, 1988). The book is a translation of that year of a 1973 book in French.

Botte was drafted into the Belgian army in April 1914 and served to August of 1919, having left off his pre-ordination studies to follow the call.

Life was like that in Northern Euro countries where seminarians were not exempt. Indeed it was like that in the early ’50s, when as a Jesuit scholastic studying philosophy I heard from a New Yorker about the French scholastic who returned to studies after a compulsory turn in the French army. For us Americans, of course, seminary occupancy was a ticket to non-service in the military.

He ran…