Two years ago this week, on the night of July 7, a Japanese private went A. W. O. L. from the maneuvers of his regiment at the Marco Polo bridge, ten miles from China's old northern capital of Peking. Apparently he had slipped off to visit a brothel, but the Japanese accused the Chinese of abducting him and holding him in the city of Wanping. Next day, although the missing man had long since taken his place in line, Japanese troops opened fire outside the east gate of the city.
Thus began the second direct test-at-arms between Japanese and Chinese since 1894. The Japanese, who aspire to rule the Far East as Britain has ruled Europe since Elizabeth's day, by fragmentation of the neighboring continent, had grown frightened of China's growing political unity and economic strength. Under Strong Man Chiang Kaishek, who the previous December had formed a tacit anti-Japanese front with the powerful Chinese Red Army, China was close to being an integrated nation—closer than at any time since the 18th Century, when the Manchus had ruled an empire that stretched from southern Burma to beyond Vladivostok. Moreover, native Chinese businessmen had begun to give not only European and American foreign devils but the despised Japanese "dwarf monkeys" real business competition in the treaty ports and the international settlement.
Confusion. A half-century ago a Japanese samurai advised his Emperor: "Wait for the time of the confusion of Europe ... we may then become the chief nation of the Orient." Two years ago the Occident was certainly confused:
Russia, riddled by the purges of the Trotskyite dissenters, was in no mood to fight a Far Eastern war on behalf of the Chinese. Great Britain, strongest European power in the Far East, was hamstrung by fears lest the year-old Civil War in Spain leap its national boundaries and rage through the Mediterranean and along the Rhine. The French Popular Front Government, bedeviled by fiscal troubles, was in no position to take part of the White Man's Burden in Asia on its sagging shoulders. The U. S., although its Navy was growing, had only recently passed a neutrality law, had signaled its desire to grant independence to the Philippines, leading Japan to conjecture that the U. S. might be abdicating its role in the Far East forever.
The Japanese had a tingling sensation in their small, tidy bones. It said to them that the time had come to pulverize their great neighbor, to nip off the five wealthy Chinese northern provinces of Shantung, Hopei, Shansi, Suiyuan, Chahar.
But if confusion in Europe made for War in Asia, trouble in Asia did not compound the immediate chances for World War No. 2 in Europe. As Far Eastern member of the anti-Comintern alliance, Japan is most useful to her German and Italian partners when she feels free to challenge Soviet Russia along the Siberian-Manchukuoan border. She is most menacing to Britain and France when she is poised as a free-wheeling threat to Singapore, French Indo-China, The Netherlands Indies. From 1935 to 1937 Japan was useful to the blackmail schemes of the Rome-Berlin dictators. After the war began, with a claimed 1,000,000 of her soldiers soaked up by the immensity of the yellow-brown