I’m talking about basically hearing explosives for the first time, seeing dudes dressed in clothing you’ve never seen before point a stick at you and that stick belches smoke and fire. Almost instantly after guys to your left and right fall over mortally wounded or dead. In quick order the entire battlefield is completely filled with thick smoke. It would be otherworldly.
I grew up in Appalachia and I think my Dad first put a small gun in my hands to show me some basics of shooting when I was 7 or 8 years old. My dad and grandpa were sighting in guns, maintaining guns on the regular my whole life. There was never a point in my life when just the sound of gunfire was strange or unusual to me. While not every person grows up so acquainted with guns, every soldier practices with guns and gets a similar amount of familiarity.
I posit that pre-Columbian warriors were no cowards and many were ferocious fighters with long warrior traditions. There’s a reason they broke in fear from guns, and it isn’t cowardice nor in my opinion is it lack of discipline. I can’t know that the Romans would break, but I can say that assuming Romans were “better” than Aztec and Inca warriors in bravery and discipline, I’m not 100% sure that is true. Some of the warrior traditions of the Western hemispheres pre-Columbian peoples were pretty ancient and well established.
Mind you the Romans lost plenty of battles in their history, they were never unbeatable in a single battle, they mostly dominated because they had logistics and manpower advantages so that one battle was never enough to put them away.
I’ll also note some serious issues with the way a lot of you are mentally setting this battle up. As I said heavy infantry in a traditional sense was still being utilized in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and many units in European armies still had heavy infantry names attached to them even when they had functionally been converted to line infantry (i.e. Grenadiers regiments and such.) Heavy infantry wasn’t done away with in the 18th century because it didn’t work at all, it just didn’t make sense to devote resources to it given the bigger picture. It was similar in many respects to why battleships went away.
But positing a scenario where you drop 500 of what would frankly be considered heavy infantry at very close range to 500 line infantry, and both sides have no complementary forces or etc, is kind of a silly situation and in my opinion doesn’t prove much. It’s again, like dropping a battleship from space 1000m away from an aircraft carrier that had just sent its entire detachment of planes on a mission. The result of that battle doesn’t “prove” a battleship is a more powerful military force than an aircraft carrier. It proves that in “a contrived situation that to have occurred in real life would have meant a series of extremely stupid blunders happened, an archaic technology can beat a superior one.” To me that isn’t particularly interesting.
Imagine a scenario where 500 Roman legionnaires are dropped on top of 500 sleeping Navy SEALs, omg the SEALs would lose, so Romans > Navy SEALs. It’s almost like there’s a reason in real life large forces don’t drop in and surprise Navy SEALs like that while all of them are sleeping, because it isn’t how real military forces operate that such a thing would happen.
Line infantry was part of a bigger whole and putting it in essentially close combat with heavy infantry from a long ago era is a very contrived situation.