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From: "Frederick Pollack" <[log in to unmask]> > Good lord - of course --- read that years ago; I guess I assumed Heinlein > got it from a real army. Thanks!! Wiki notes that Heinlein references "Danny Deever": "Robert A. Heinlein makes reference to "dance Danny Deever" in the novel "Starship Troopers", in a long chapter about the execution of a soldier by his training batallion. It appears a very liberal lift from Kipling, to include even the recruits' adverse reactions (collapse and faintings), and does focus on the reactions of one particular recruit within the context of his own self-discovery." The remaining question might be when first, why, and how Handel's Dead March from Saul comes to be used at military executions. It seems to be a fairly widespread phenomenon connected to military executions in the late 18th/19th C, but before that? So how did it come about? Robin