Read Eve of a Hundred Midnights for Free Online Page A

of the roughly 200,000 people who lived inside the walls wore flat, sombrero-like straw hats and occupied clay buildings that reminded Mel of Native American adobes.
    â€œ[Sian] is entirely different than anything we have seen before,” Mel wrote to his parents. Once the terminus of the Silk Road, the city was also home to the twelve-century-old Nestorian Tablet, a nearly ten-foot-tall stone marker inscribed with Chinese and Syrian characters proclaiming Christianity’sarrival in China. Mel made an ink rubbing of the inscription and had his picture taken next to the tablet.
    â€œSo here we are in the Northwest looking at the remains of the beginnings of China and perhaps the world—maybe not, too,” Mel wrote. “At least it is very interesting and a place very few people reach.”
    Mel and Harry spent forty cents in the local currency to rent a small room in a courtyard home, then sought out the few other Westerners who had reached Sian. One was Kempton Fitch, a young Texaco employee who had recently shuttled a series of Western journalists and academics to the Communist stronghold in nearby Yenan. The other was George Armstrong Young, an English World War I vet–turned–missionary who helped mediate Chiang’s release during the Sian crisis. Fitch and Young explained nuances of that event that hadn’t been reported in Canton to the students.
    â€œAfter trying to fathom the bottom of the problem during the past few months all of us over here have found that one link, the Communists, missing,” Mel admitted. “No one before told us that they came into the city here during the revolt.”
    Mel suspected that Chinese leaders, wanting to keep the rest of the world from knowing that the fate of the country’s central government had rested on the Communists’ actions, were keeping that part of the story away from newspapers back in the United States and elsewhere.
    Mel and Harry wanted to see the site of Chiang’s kidnapping itself, so the next morning they rode on the floor of a packed bus for a jolting forty-five-minute trip to the Huaqing Pool, the cave-hewn hot springs resort where Chiang was held. Government officials were already constructing a monument to the incident. Fitch had also suggested that he might be able to get the boys into Yenan, which was a two-day drive from Sian.
    But as soon as Mel and Harry returned from the Huaqing Pool they learned about a new crisis across the country that would keep them from visiting Yenan. This crisis marked what many now regard as the beginning of World War II in Asia. It erupted just southwest of Peiping, another former capital, after six years of simmering tensions and occasional skirmishes that had followed Japan’s invasion of Manchuria.
    The fighting began along the banks of the Yongding River, where an eight-century-old arched span of white granite called Lugouqiao, or the Marco Polo Bridge, crossed its waters. Along each side of the bridge, there were stone rails that held the grinning faces of 501 sculpted lions. The mirth and joy carved into the statues contrasted sharply with the seriousness of the crisis approaching from either side of the river. The bridge separated two armies: the Chinese 29th Route Army, garrisoned behind the ancient walls of Wanping, a fortress at the east end of the crossing, and a company of Japanese soldiers camped on the other side.
    On July 7, the commander of the Japanese contingent claimed that one of his soldiers had gone missing. Treaties signed after the 1900 Boxer Rebellion had given foreign powers—Japan included—the right to station troops in China as protection for their nation’s interests in the country. Invoking these agreements, the Japanese commander demanded that he be allowed to search Wanping for his missing soldier. When China’s 29th Route Army commander, Song Zheyuan, refused the Japanese commander’s demands, shots rang out from both