When I told them to shoot the children, and the mothers too, I did not think of my daughter, safe on our terrace back home, sipping chilled wine while she studied.

One day, she would make a fine doctor. She had always been so caring.

I had left her a gun, only because she was a woman alone. And who knew better than I what could happen to a woman alone?

Sometimes at the front we got the foreign papers, the ones that called me “the Butcher”. “Lies,” my men would laugh, “All lies! Let them show proof.” But of course we made sure there was no proof. And when I called my daughter, I told her, “Don't believe that propaganda. They welcome us here. With flowers and parades.”

Then one day a paper came with pictures – pictures of the bodies, pictures of the graves. I exploded. “How did this happen? Who let these get through?” I was far too angry to think of my daughter.

But back home, she was thinking of me - of her hero father, the father who'd lied to her. The father who'd left her a gun. First she laid that same paper out before her, with its awful weight of proof. Then she erased those images, and her love, with a single shot.

With one shot she defeated me, defeated the feared, all-powerful general.