sailing force. Every moment he expected
that Montgomery would arrive to attack the second barrier on the Sault
au Matelot from the West as he attacked it from the East. But
Montgomery was dead and Morgan waited in vain.

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