While the Americans were checked by the second barrier, Carleton was not idle.  There was an excellent chance to send a force out of the Palace Gate near the Hotel Dieu, by which the assailants had passed, and to attack them in the rear.  For this duty Colonel Caldwell was told off and he took with him Nairne and his picket of about thirty men.  The force plodded through the deep snow in the tracks of the enemy who, about daybreak, were astonished to find themselves shut in by British forces at each end of the Sault au Matelot.  A hand to hand fight followed.  The Americans took refuge in the houses of the street and it was the task of the British to drive them out.  In this Nairne distinguished himself.  “Major Nairne of the Royal Emigrants and M. Dambourges of the same corps by their gallant behaviour attracted the attention of every body,” writes an English officer.[8] By ladders, taken from the enemy, they mounted to a window of one of the houses, from which came a destructive fire, and at the point of the bayonet drove the foe out by the door into the street.  In the end, to the number of more than four hundred, the Americans were forced to surrender.  The casualties included thirty killed and forty-two wounded.  By eight o’clock all was over.  “It was the first time I ever happened to be so closely engaged,” Nairne wrote to his sister on May 14th, 1776, “as we were obliged to push our bayonets.  It is certainly a disagreeable necessity to be obliged to put one another to death, especially those speaking the same language and dressed in the same manner with ourselves....  These mad people had a large piece of white linen or paper upon their foreheads with the words “Liberty or Death” wrote upon it.”  Nairne’s account is modest enough.  One would not gather from it that his own conspicuous courage had obtained general recognition.[9]

Even with Montgomery killed, Arnold wounded, and quite one-quarter of their force dead or captured, those grim men who wished “Liberty or Death” had no thought of raising the siege.  Ere long Arnold was again active and, for four months longer, the Americans kept Carleton shut up within Quebec.  So deep lay the snow that to walk into the ditch from the embrasures in the walls was easy; buried in the snow were the muzzles of guns thirty feet from the bottom of the ditch.  Sometimes Nairne was actively engaged in scouting work.  In February we find him leading a party to take possession of the English burying ground in the suburbs; on March 19th, he went out into the open from Cape Diamond to the height overlooking the Anse de Mer.  But nothing happened; a diarist expresses, on April 21st, his contempt for the American attack by writing:  “Hitherto they have killed a boy, wounded a soldier, and broke the leg of a turkey."[10]