But according to the Pentagon, war — at least the impending war in Iraq — is Shakespeare, the 5th-century BC Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and two modern bestsellers about heroism and wartime correspondence. Before Christmas the US Defence Department began distributing free, pocket-sized copies of these books to its troops, to ensure that soldiers are improving their minds while removing Saddam. More than 100,000 copies have been given away so far.

The project, set up by a group of publishers with charitable support and Pentagon help, is a deliberate echo of the mass distribution of paperbacks to American soldiers that took place in the Second World War; the largest handout of free literature in history. In 1942 the US War Department hit on the idea of the Armed Services Edition, books specifically for servicemen in the field. The books were cheap to produce, horizontal in format, oblong-shaped to slip into an ammunition pouch, with large print to be read by candle or torchlight and cover designs resembling film posters. The titles catered for every brow height, from the Odyssey to Forever Amber; from Dickens to Twain to Virginia Woolf; literary classics, popular novels, non-fiction and even plays.

What most soldiers remember of war, apart from the brief moments of terror and general discomfort, is the sheer, mind-crushing boredom. The GIs could not read enough of the free literature: 123 million copies of 1,300 titles were given away before the project ended in 1947, forging an entire generation of well-read veterans. The project directly affected American literary tastes: just 25,000 copies were sold of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby between 1925 and 1942, but 155,000 copies were distributed to soldiers overseas, who returned home hungry for more.

The Armed Services Edition even became a tool of postwar reconstruction, handed out or left behind by GIs in liberated lands starved of literature. In 1945 the German author Hans Magnus Enzenberger, then a teenager, stole an entire crate of the books and later recalled: “Courtesy of the American taxpayer, I was introduced to Hemingway, Faulkner and F.Scott Fitzgerald . . . I devoured them all.” Many Germans read Kafka and Thomas Mann, banned under the Nazis, for the first time in the military edition.

What, one wonders, would an English-reading Iraqi make of the literature destined to accompany latterday US troops into battle? So far, the organisers have distributed Shakespeare’s Henry V, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Medal of Honor: Profiles of America’s Military Heroes from the Civil War to the Present by Allen Mikaelian, and War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars edited by Andrew Carroll, the organiser of the project.

The choice is resoundingly patriotic, fairly unimaginative, and ramrod straight, as one might expect given that the selection had to pass through the military bureaucratic process. “Getting quality reading material to our troops on the front lines is a great initiative, and one that all the Armed Services are eager to support,” Rear-Admiral Stephen R. Pietropaoli, the Pentagon’s chief of naval information, said, sounding like a character in Catch-22.

In 1942 Armed Service Edition books were promoted as “weapons in the war of ideas”, but the single most powerful message of 20th-century war literature is of the sheer horror and hopelessness of war, the knowledge that while war may be just, it can never be good. There is little of that war-weary scepticism in the new selection, unless you count Sun Tzu’s observation that “the best way to win war is not to fight”.

The absence of novels on the list is strange, for fiction was hugely popular with the troops in the Second World War, and a novelist or poet can say far more about what war is really like even than a Chinese military strategist, let alone a hero-worshipper. But as Mr Carroll points out, the new American Service Edition is not intended to be a library, like its predecessor, but a pilot project, the first of a new range of battlefield books.

Military-literary tastes reflect the times. During the American Civil War the soldiers of both South and North were avidly ploughing through Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and at the beginning of the first major conflict of the 21st century no soldier should go into battle without a 20th-century war novel. Not the simplistic, gung-ho fantasies of Tom Clancy, but books that question war, like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, or Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. War and Peace remains one of the greatest depictions of war, but perhaps not ideal pocket-edition material in case a swift retreat is called for.

For my money, the best counterweight to the patriotic, once-more-unto-the-breach tenor of the new American selection would be the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden; or Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, still the most moving depiction of genuine, miserable, morally ambiguous war, without which no modern army kit-bag is properly packed.

The writer and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien once wrote: “A true war story is never moral . . . If at the end of a war story you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.” This goes too far, for although the humane remnant surviving war’s carnage does not render it moral, it makes the horror bearable.

For Remarque, this “spark of humanity” was symbolised by a soldier cooking a meagre supper for his comrade in the trenches, amid the killing fields; in the coming conflict one of the most human images may be of a soldier in the midst of a desert battlefield, engrossed in a good book.

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