Maybe this shows my literary ignorance but what does the last line in the song really mean?

"And mercy on our uniform,
man of peace or man of war,
the peacock spreads his (deadly) fan"

thanks again [/i]

The Paper that I'm doing on "story of isaac" is a line by line analysis. I'm a music student and I'm singing this song for a class and part of the assignment is to write this paper. I've done a fair amount of research and for the most part I'm finding that LC is fairly ambiguous about a sp...

Anyone have any interpretations of "the story of isaac". I'm writing a paper and have a few ideas but i'm interested to know what other people think. Thanks