They received him with open arms, and when he told them a cock-and-bull story of his adventures in the French camp, nothing would do but that he must enter the Secret Service of the Austrian Army. Such a valuable man was not to be lost.
The news of this was taken to the short man in the long gray coat, and as he paced up and down amidst his brilliantly uniformed officers he was heard to give vent to a chuckle—the sort of a chuckle one expects from a man whose plans are working precisely as he wished.
In the meantime Schulmeister settled down to business in earnest. He gained the acquaintance and then the friendship of two very important men. One was Captain Wend of the Austrian Secret Service, and the other Lieutenant Bendel, aide-de-camp to General Kienmayer. In this, as in all else, he had followed the advice of his Corsican superior. With him, as with the greater man, time was “everything.”
A less audacious man would have hesitated about approaching such officers as Wend and Bendel; a less courageous man would have feared it, and a less imaginative man would never have thought of it. But Schulmeister had audacity, courage and imagination. He unbosomed himself to these two men, he pointed out the possibilities of the future and he painted the glories and the rewards of the Napoleonic empire.
In less than twenty-four hours Captain Wend and Lieutenant Bendel had become his allies, and thereafter worked with him hand and glove.
The next necessary move was to obtain the confidence of the higher Austrian officers and to find out their plans. He was able to do this with the assistance of Captain Wend and Lieutenant Bendel.
The Allies had a great body of soldiers in the field. The chief figure was Field Marshal Baron Mack, who had 90,000 splendidly equipped and well trained men under his command. His army formed the right wing of an enormous host, of which Archduke Charles with 140,000 men in northern Italy and Archduke John with 50,000 more in the passes of the Tyrol were important adjuncts.
General Mack was impressed with the great strength of his troops and felt that he could easily overcome Napoleon with the superiority of his numbers. Schulmeister learned of this over-confidence and was all the more anxious to reach the big man. Captain Wend undertook to present the Alsatian to Mack. It proved to be easy. The Austrian commander was not anxious to move unless it was necessary, and when he learned that there was a man in the vicinity who had been in the camp of Napoleon he was eager to meet him.
Schulmeister was bidden to come into his presence and told to describe all that he had seen in the camp of the “enemy.” He did so with a vividness of imagination that would have done credit to Baron Munchausen.
For nearly an hour the medium-sized man with the ugly scars and the sky-blue eyes sat there and poured fiction into the ears of the great general—the man decorated with many medals and filled with a sense of his own importance. And Mack believed it all. At the conclusion the Austrian turned to one of his subordinates.