Private HWB Palin drew one of history’s shorter straws. Having survived Gallipoli in 1915, in 1916 he fetched up on the Somme. His body, known only unto God, was never recovered. To participate in one of humanity’s bloodiest battles may be counted a misfortune. Two looks like the sadism of fate. More than a century on, however, this previously unknown soldier gets a posthumous stroke of luck. In Great-Uncle Harry, his famous great-nephew Michael has pieced together his story, and it has all the makings of a globe-trotting epic spanning oceans and continents, citadels and empires. The only problem is that Harry is much the blurriest figure on Palin’s family tree. The last of nine children born to a Herefordshire vicar and his American wife in 1884, he underwhelmed at school – Shrewsbury, later attended by Palin M – and was packed off to India where, working on tea plantations, the main impression he made was negative. “He is a rather self-satisfied young man,” snorted one employer.…