OUR memory of the Great War is defined by two ostensibly opposing co-ordinates: the Unknown Soldier and the poet everyone knows. Exhumed and then re-buried amid a riot of symbolism in Westminster Abbey on the second anniversary of the armistice, the former lies at the core of a programme of national Remembrance which endures, in muted form, to the present day.

BAGHDAD (Reuter) - President Saddam Hussein, trying to mend fences with the United States, praised President Bill Clinton's opposition to the Vietnam War and urged him to display similar wisdom in dealing with Iraq.

JAPAN'S ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is preparing to review the country's 1947 anti-war constitution - long a taboo subject in this country, which has still to come to terms with wartime atrocities committed against its neighbours. The LDP proposal comes from Hiroshi Mitsuzuka, chairman of the party's policy affairs research council, but has been publicly supported in recent weeks by the Foreign Minister, Michio Watanabe.

TONY HARRISON is probably best known for his determined use of four- letter words. His headline-making poem 'v' actually had the temerity to reprint the curses scrawled on gravestones by stunned and dejected Leeds United fans. It was a great poem. Hardly anyone since Philip Larkin had been able to cram general ideas about social antagonism (v. stands for versus), tender feelings for everyday concerns and candid confessional gestures into such a terrific abbreviated vocabulary. More than that, the poem was poured fluently into blank verse, English poetry's most aristocratic form. But for some reason there were still people precious enough to be enraged by the presence of those undeleted expletives.

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'In Post Mortem,' Sheridan Morley explains in a programme note, '(Noel) Coward does not so much write as explode onto paper.' The logical reaction, one would think, would be 'Duck]' but Richard Stirling has, with more theatrical fervour than regard for basic safety practices, decided to give the 1930 one-act drama its first professional stage production. The efforts of his large and energetic cast, however, only show that this rather hysterical anti-war play has been under cover for good reason.

At one point in Elem Klimov's Come and See, the 15-year-old partisan hero, played by Alexei Krauchenko, is caught in a pine forest during a Nazi bombing raid. The scene is an ecologist's nightmare - real trees are demolished by the score. But the most jarring element of the sequence is the sound: Krauchenko's ear-drums are ruptured by his proximity to the blasts, and for the next 10 minutes the soundtrack consists of a high-pitched screaming noise.