He did what he could to make possible this Christmas festivity within Quebec’s walls.  His men got together some five hundred scaling ladders.  Then heavy snow came and the defenders jeered at such preparations:  “Can they think it possible that they can approach the walls laden with ladders, sinking to the middle every step in snow?  Where shall we be then?  Shall we be looking on cross-armed?” The clear and inconceivably cold weather was also one of Quebec’s defences for, as one diarist puts it, no man, after being exposed to it for ten minutes, could hold arms in his half-frozen hands firmly enough to do any execution.  But by nothing short of death itself was Montgomery to be daunted; steadily he made his plans to assault the town.

Meanwhile Quebec was ready.  Carleton ordered out of the town all who could not assist to the best of their power in the defence.  Some shammed illness to escape their tasks.  But this was the exception.  Well-to-do citizens worked zealously, took their share of sentry duty on the bitterly cold nights, and submitted to the commands of officers in the militia, their inferiors in education and fortune.  On the loftiest point of Cape Diamond Carleton erected a mast, thirty feet high, with a sentry box at its top.  From this he could command a bird’s eye view of the enemy’s operations, to a point as distant as Ste. Foy Church.  When one of the besiegers asked a loyalist Canadian what the queer-looking object on the pole really was he answered, “It is a wooden horse with a bundle of hay before him.”  A second remark capped this one:  “General Carleton has said that he will not give up the town till the horse has ate all the hay; and the General is a man of his word.”

Although Montgomery did not eat his Christmas dinner in Quebec a few days later he was ready for an assault.  The crisis came on the last day of the year 1775.  Early on that day, between four and five in the morning, Captain Malcolm Fraser, in command of the main guard, was going his rounds in Quebec when he saw a signal thrown by the enemy from the heights outside the walls near Cape Diamond.  Fraser knew at once that it meant an attack.  He sent word to the other guards in Quebec and ordered the ringing of the alarm bell, and the drum-beat to arms.  He himself ran down St. Louis street, shouting to the guards to “Turn out” as loudly and often as he could, and with such effect that he was heard even by General Carleton, lodged at the Recollet convent.  It was a boisterous night and the elements themselves raged so fiercely that some of the alarms were not heard.  But, in time, all Quebec was aroused and the guards stood at their posts.

The alarm was completed when to its din was added the menacing sound of cannon.  The besiegers began to ply the town with shells, and those who looked out over the ramparts could see in the darkness the flash of guns.  Soon began from behind ridges of snow, within eighty yards of the walls of Cape Diamond, the patter of musketry.  The Americans were seeking to lead the defenders of Quebec to believe that an assault on the walls of the Upper Town on the side of the Plains of Abraham was imminent and to hold the defence to this point.  In fact the real danger was far away.