Operation Market-Garden, costing thousands of young lives, went ahead anyway. “Monty” wanted to outshine his American rival, General George Patton, no matter what. A little more than six months later, already disillusioned by the arrogant stupidity of his own side, Urquhart was among the first Allied soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen. First, the idiocy, then the horror. When the war was finally over, he could not summon up much joy. And yet, somehow, he avoided the trap of cynicism. He recalled in his memoir: “I did not meditate that things would never be the same. I hadn’t had too much experience of the old order and did not feel I would miss it. I did think that the greatest task at hand would be to help prevent such disasters from ever happening again.”1 Before the war, Urquhart had been excited by the League of Nations. His internationalist enthusiasm had been inspired, he recalls, by his childhood connection to a private girls’ boarding school, Badminton, run by an eccentric headmistress named Miss Beatrice M.
