<P> It is generally read as being set in India, though it gives no details of the actual situation . Some research has suggested that the poem was written with a specific incident in mind, the execution of one Private Flaxman of The Leicestershire Regiment, at Lucknow in 1887 . A number of details of this execution correspond to the occasion described by Kipling in the poem, and he later used a story similar to that of Flaxman's as a basis for the story Black Jack . </P> <P> Kipling apparently wrote the various Barrack - Room Ballads in early 1890, about a year since he had last been in India, and three years since Flaxman's execution . Though he wrote large amounts of occasional verse, he usually added a note beneath the title giving the context of the poem . Danny Deever does not have any such notes, but "Cleared" (a topical poem on the Parnell Commission), written in the same month as Danny Deever, does . This suggests that it was not thought by Kipling to be inspired by a specific incident, though it is quite possible that he remembered the Flaxman case . </P> <P> The form is a dialogue, between a young and inexperienced soldier (or soldiers; he is given as "Files - on - Parade", suggesting a group) and a more experienced and older NCO ("the Colour - Sergeant"). The setting is an execution, generally presumed to be somewhere in India; a soldier, one Danny Deever, has been tried and sentenced to death for murdering a fellow soldier in his sleep, and his battalion is paraded to see the hanging . This procedure strengthened discipline in the unit, by a process of deterrence, and helped inure inexperienced soldiers to the sight of death . </P> <P> The young soldier is unaware of what is happening, at first--he asks why the bugles are blowing, and why the Sergeant looks so pale, but is told that Deever is being hanged, and that the regiment is drawn up in "(h) ollow square" to see it . He presses the Sergeant further, in the second verse--why are people breathing so hard? why are some men collapsing? These signs of the effect that watching the hanging has upon the men of the regiment are explained away by the Sergeant as being due to the cold weather or the bright sun . The voice is reassuring, keeping the young soldier calm in the sight of death, just as the Sergeant will calm him with his voice in combat . In the third verse, Files thinks of Deever, saying that he slept alongside him, and drank with him, but the Sergeant reminds him that Deever is now alone, that he sleeps "out an' far to - night", and reminds the soldier of the magnitude of Deever's crime--</P>

Who are the two characters who speak in danny deever