Frosty forest. Roe walks purposefully across the snow, blazing past Winters's foxhole and into one he now shares with Heffron. "Everything okay, Babe?" he asks. Babe nods glumly. Roe catches sight of the man's hand wound and inquires, "How'd you do that?" Babe turns to regard him for a second, then sighs, "You did it." Roe is alarmed. He hurriedly promises to fix it up, rummaging for bandages but withdrawing only Renée's scarf. He stares at it again and decides to put it away, then changes his mind, possibly recalling the tenderness with which the wearer ministered to her patients. Or, he's just following his director's orders. I love how his inner peace, his resolution, comes from a small square of cloth. A slight oversimplification of his problem, I think. Tearing the kerchief in half, he begins wrapping Babe's hand. Heffron suddenly looks over at Roe with a wondering smile. "Hey, Gene, you called me Babe," he grins. Roe stops. "I did?" he asks, then tries it out again. "Babe," he says, his lilting Cajun accent drawing out the word. "I guess I did." Babe laughs and imitates him. "Heffron, watch the goddamn line," Roe commands, but he's chuckling too, because "Babe" is the worst nickname of all.

Flipping to a shot from behind their heads, we see their view of the line -- still a nebulous fog hiding Satan only knows what. In front of Roe's foxhole, two giant patches of red-stained snow mar the white landscape.

"On December 26, 1944, General Patton's 3rd Army broke through the German lines, allowing supplies to flow in and the wounded to be evacuated," the screen reads. "The story of 'The Battle of the Bulge,' as told today, is one of Patton coming to the rescue of the encircled 101st Airborne." A pause. Then, "No member of the 101st has ever agreed that the division needed to be rescued." A New Yorker review of the show aptly noted that what that remark is missing is the exclamation point Stephen Ambrose used to punctuate it. It's a choice that gave the statement both the emphasis the veterans would've added, but also the wink of a reader who knows that no Easy Company man would ever admit to needing assistance.