The fourth line brings a measure of relief after the warning of the line before it: the army retreats to camp on its flank, an act of prudent withdrawal rather than rash advance, and this brings no blame. Positioned at the base of the upper trigram, Kun, the earth and the larger body the army ultimately serves, this line shows the force drawing back toward its own support rather than pressing forward into uncertain ground. The line text is notable for treating retreat itself as blameless, even praiseworthy, which fits the hexagram's broader argument that discipline includes knowing when not to advance as much as it includes the capacity to advance at all. This is not the desperate retreat of a beaten force but a deliberate, unhurried repositioning, camping rather than fleeing, on the flank rather than in headlong reversal.
Read after line three's image of divided command and possible defeat, line four offers a corrective model: recognizing an unfavorable moment and withdrawing from it calmly is exactly the kind of judgment that a single, trusted commander, of the sort described in line two, would be expected to exercise. The absence of blame attached to this retreat stands in deliberate contrast to line three immediately before it, where a comparable uncertainty produced the hexagram's bleakest image instead of a blameless one.