A north-easterly snowstorm was blowing furiously, straight up the St Lawrence, making Quebec a partly seen blur to the nearest American patrols and the Heights of Abraham a wild sea of whirling drifts to the nearest British sentries.  One o’clock passed, and nothing stirred.  But when two o’clock struck at Holland House Montgomery rose and began to put the council’s plan in operation.  The Lower Town was to be attacked at both ends.  The Pres-de-Ville barricade was to be carried by Montgomery and the Sault-au-Matelot by Arnold, while Livingston was to distract Carleton’s attention as much as possible by making a feint against the landward walls, where the British still expected the real attack.  Livingston’s Canadian fighting ‘patriots’ waded through the drifts, against the storm, across the Plains, and took post close in on the far side of Cape Diamond, only eighty yards from the same walls that were to have been stormed some days before.  Jerry Duggan’s parasitic Canadian ‘patriots’ took post in the suburb of St John and thence round to Palace Gate.  Montgomery led his own column straight to Wolfe’s Cove, whence he marched in along the narrow path between the cliff and the St Lawrence till he reached the spot at the foot of Cape Diamond just under the right of Livingston’s line.  Arnold, whose quarters were in the valley of the St Charles, took post in St Roch, with a mortar battery to fire against the walls and a column of men to storm the Sault-au-Matelot.  Livingston’s and Jerry Duggan’s whole command numbered about four hundred men, Montgomery’s five hundred, Arnold’s six.  The opposing totals were fifteen hundred Americans against seventeen hundred British.  There was considerable risk of confusion between friend and foe, as most of the Americans, especially Arnold’s men, wore captured British uniforms with nothing to distinguish them but odds and ends of their former kits and a sort of paper hatband bearing the inscription Liberty or Death.

A little after four the sentries on the walls at Cape Diamond saw lights flashing about in front of them and were just going to call the guard when Captain Malcolm Fraser of the Royal Emigrants came by on his rounds and saw other lights being set out in regular order like lamps in a street.  He instantly turned out the guards and pickets.  The drums beat to arms.  Every church bell in the city pealed forth its alarm into that wild night.  The bugles blew.  The men off duty swarmed on to the Place d’Armes, where Carleton, calm and intrepid as ever, took post with the general reserve and waited.  There was nothing for him to do just yet.  Everything that could have been foreseen had already been amply provided for; and in his quiet confidence his followers found their own.