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sides. Early the next morning, Japan reinforced its garrison with machine-gun units and armored vehicles, then again opened fire on the bridge and Song’s army, which lost scores of soldiers.
    The Japanese used the incident and Song’s intransigence as a rationale for a full-scale attack on Peiping. The question thenbecame whether Chiang Kai-shek—who was at a summer resort in the mountains southwest of Nanking—would leave Song Zheyuan to handle the Japanese on his own or back up his general with the full force of his military. Such a response could plunge underprepared China into full-scale war with Japan.
    The Kuomintang maintained a far-from-definitive hold on China, and the Lugouqiao incident tested the party’s unity with the Communists. It wasn’t clear who would join Chiang if he went to war. Japan had controlled much of northern China since it invaded Manchuria in 1931, while political rivals of Chiang’s controlled other Chinese provinces and the militaries within them whose support Chiang would need for a full-scale war. On the other hand, if Chiang backed down, his inaction could embolden Japan.
    â€œIf it were just [Peiping], that would be one thing, but Chiang feared that the city would be just one more conquest in an ever-lengthening list of Japanese provocations in China,” the scholar Rana Mitter later wrote.
    And Chiang knew he was unlikely to receive international assistance. Europe was occupied with the Spanish Civil War and the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy. The United States, still reeling from the Great Depression, in addition to its memories of the First World War, wanted little to do with another distant struggle, yet less with a continent that policymakers, the media, and the public continued to discuss through Orientalist stereotypes. Few international powers wanted to be drawn into a messy regional dispute, one from which they could gain little, and it was highly unlikely that President Roosevelt would get American troops involved in China when he hadn’t intervened in Spain.
    â€œTo return to a war in Europe would be unpopular; to entera conflict in China was close to unthinkable,” Mitter wrote of U.S. foreign policy. “So if Chiang wanted to fight back against Japan, he would have to do it on his own.”
    Mel and Harry had no clue that any of this was happening until they reached Taiyuan, the capital of Shanshi Province (Shanxi), but the trip to Taiyuan gave them a glimpse of the high tensions in China. When they crossed the Yellow River in T’ung-Kuan (Tongguan), a Chinese customs official checking Mel’s passport froze when he saw the visa for Mel’s upcoming Japan tour. Because Japanese troops occupied nearby Inner Mongolia, local officials were nervous about spies, and this official was immediately suspicious of Mel and Harry. It didn’t matter to him that they weren’t Japanese.
    â€œAnti-foreign feeling is strong and the countless officers about us have loaded guns which I am sure they wouldn’t hesitate to use on us,” Mel wrote after the official grudgingly let the students pass.
    By the time Mel and Harry arrived in Taiyuan on July 11, the rumor mill had transformed the skirmishes outside Lugouqiao into full-scale attacks on China’s main strategic corridor, a trunk rail line that connected Peiping to Hankow (Hankou, now part of Wuhan). The students were given wildly inflated reports that more than 1,000 soldiers had already died in the battle. The fear was that if Japan seized control of the railway, it could send troops stationed in Korea and Manchuria into the heart of China. Such an attack hadn’t actually happened (Japan did make a few small air strikes on the rail line), but Mel and Harry couldn’t get any solid information about what was going on because communication lines between Peiping and China’s interior were down.
    â€œAll we did find out was that we