in". On one occasion, Powell's yellow skin (he was recovering from jaundice), over-formal dress and strange manner caused him to be mistaken for a Japanese spy. During this period, he declined to meet a Cambridge academic colleague, Glyn Daniel, for a drink or dinner as he was devoting his limited leisure time to studying the poet John Donne. Powell had continued to learn Urdu and was taught by a nephew of the Urdu poet Altaf Hussain Hali. He had an unrealised ambition to compose a critical edition of Hali's Musaddas, The Rise and Fall of Islam. He also had an ambition of becoming Viceroy of India, and when Mountbatten transferred his staff to Kandy, Ceylon, Powell chose to remain in Delhi. He was promoted to full colonel at the end of March 1944, as assistant director of military intelligence in India, giving intelligence support to the Burma campaign of William Slim. Having begun the war as the youngest professor in the British Empire, Powell ended it as a brigadier. He was given the promotion to serve on a committee of generals and brigadiers to plan the postwar defence of India: the resulting 470-page report was almost entirely written by Powell. For a few weeks he was the youngest brigadier in the British Army, and he was one of only two men in the entire war to rise from private to brigadier (the other being Fitzroy Maclean). He was offered a regular commission as a brigadier in the Indian Army, and the post of assistant commandant of an Indian officers' training academy, which he declined. He told a colleague that he expected to be head of all military intelligence in "the next war". Powell never experienced combat and felt guilty for having survived, writing that soldiers who did so carried "a sort of shame with them to the grave" and referring to the Second Battle of El Alamein as a "separating flame" between the living and the dead. When once asked how he would like to be remembered, he at first answered, "Others will remember me as they will remember me", but when pressed he replied, "I should like to have been killed in the war". Entry into politics Joining the Conservative Party Though he voted for the Labour Party in their 1945 landslide victory, because he wanted to punish the Conservative Party for the Munich agreement, after the war he