In early December 1746 a force of one hundred men under the command of Captain Charles Morris was sent to Grand Pré.

Upon Noble's arrival he ordered the troops brought into Grand Pré where they were billeted in twenty-four houses that extended across the village for nearly two and a half miles.

The warning was ignored as the New Englanders felt it was "impracticable" to project such an attack that would mean a long march through deep snow and across "rivers being froze with ice floating up and down".

De Villiers ordered Boishébert to cross the river with ten men and "to block the roads of the inhabitants in this district to make sure we are not discovered.

At Cobequid (Truro), de Villiers took precaution "to block all the paths because the ill-intentioned inhabitants could undertake to pass and alert the English to our march.

By midday on February 10, despite a raging blizzard, the troops were on their final march, taking the old Acadian road over Horton Mountain to Melanson Village in the Gaspereau Valley, just a few miles from Grand Pré.

The French, on the night of February 10 in a blinding snowstorm and utilizing the element of surprise, attacked ten of the houses in which the New Englanders were billeted.

De Villiers' left arm was shattered almost immediately by a musket ball, a wound that would later lead to his death.

Eventually the British force rallied to concentrate their troops in a stronghold within a stone house in the center of the village which they held with 350 men and several small artillery pieces.

The fighting continued until the next morning when a cease fire was arranged to end the stand-off as the French were unable to storm the stone house while the British were running out of ammunition and food.

The British marched away with full honours of war as article 3 of the capitulation stated: "That the troops of his most Christian Majesty shall be drawn up in two ranks with rested firelocks and that the troops of his Britannic Majesty should march thro them with all the military Honours of War with drums beating and colours flying.

"[3] The six-day march back through deep snow, unassisted by snowshoes, caused the New Englanders to suffer "extreme fatigues, excessive colds, and difficulties we laboured under through our men into violent fevers and fluxes at their return by which means we lost one hundred and fifty more.

One of the Acadians who accompanied the French on this expedition was Zedore Gould then aged 20, who afterwards escaping the Expulsion was a tenant to DesBarres on his Minudie estate.