During the nineteenth-century colonial wars and later throughout the two World Wars of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of men and women from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands were sent to sites of imperial conflicts in Europe, as well as to regions in China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and South Africa. Today, their stories wander the no man’s land between Eurocentric war narratives and nationalist histories. Santanu Das’s lecture has two aims: first, to investigate how a common ‘colonial’ war experience can be discussed without compromising the specificity or complexity of individual histories. Second, to consider how the experiences of these men and women speak to us today and to examine what role artworks play in addressing such messy pasts. Anchored in the First World War, the lecture engages with trench artefacts, photographs, paintings, sound recordings, literature, and contemporary artworks to explore how an ‘archive of experience’ can be constructed to commemorate these colonized soldiers without celebrating war itself.