'Fading Away' of Old Soldiers Now Completely Discredited By Medical Evidence

The death of Harry Patch - the last survivor of the horrors of trench warfare in World War One - has conclusively disproved the once-prevalent medical theory that old soldiers did not, in fact, die at all, but merely faded away.

"Harry certainly didn't fade away," said a spokesman for the Bath care home in which he passed away at the age of 111. "He died in the usual way, just like non-soldiers do, and his body is very much in evidence at the hospital morgue."

Mr Patch's fade-defying demise comes only days after his fellow-veteran of the Great War, Henry Allingham, similarly died in a completely material manner.

Conscripted into the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry as a machine gunner after the Battle of the Somme wiped out most of British youth's former enthusiasm for volunteering for the glorious opportunity to be eviscerated, gassed, mutilated, bayoneted, riddled with bullets, blown to fragments, drowned in mud or merely driven insane by the relentless mind-numbing horror and shot by their own side, Harry arrived at the front line in 1917 - just in time to take part in the hideously pointless slaughter of Passchendaele, during which a German shell exploded above him, killing three of his friends outright and slicing him open so badly that he was still in hospital when the war ended over a year later.

For most of his life afterwards, Mr Patch was strangely reluctant to boast of his worthwhile efforts to promote the democratic British way of life to foreign nations, shunning the annual wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph as "show business" and insisting that "war isn't worth a single life" - until the media tracked him down in recent years and repeatedly dragged him from his retirement home, as part of their inspirational campaign to convince the public that dying needlessly for some nebulous idea which exists only in the heads of politicians is in fact the noblest and most honourable pinnacle of human achievement.

The same public figures who issued statements last week praising Henry Allingham quickly emailed the same statements to the press again today with the names changed, then carried on with what they were doing.

However, not all doctors have given up entirely on the idea of old soldiers fading away instead of dying.

"There is still one British survivor of the First World War," said an Australian GP. "Claude Choules served with the Royal Navy; but since he now lives down here in Perth and nobody today realises that the navy also took part in The War To End Wars, he seems to have faded completely from public awareness."