In her 1998 ground-breaking article, Christine Darrohn persuasively argued for Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Garden Party’ (1921) to be read as a profoundly war-conscious story, among other things ‘haunted […] by the dead young soldiers’, including her brother Leslie who died in October 1915. Many other scholars have since demonstrated that this is not the only one of Mansfield's seemingly non-war stories which touch upon the ramifications of the four years of carnage that so tragically impacted her generation. Indeed, Volume 6 of Katherine Mansfield Studies was entirely dedicated to the First World War, and Alice Kelly's recent Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War, explores in many different ways how inextricably, even if obliquely, war is woven into the fabric of a number of Mansfield's stories, including those that do not make any overt mention of it and whose temporal setting pre-dates it. Furthermore, analysing Mansfield's personal writings and correspondence, Kelly and Lawrence Mitchell respectively have disproved some past claims that Mansfield and Murry were ‘oblivious to the cataclysm’ of the war and saw it only as a personal inconvenience. Kelly documents how, from its very beginning, war permeated Mansfield's personal writing, firstly eliciting ‘creative joy in new linguistic possibilities offered by [it]’, and later becoming ‘a counter-trope to her own battle with illness, providing a framework for her depiction of her illness and a less immediate means of discussing the possibility of death’. This essay enters the discussion by examining some aspects of ‘Prelude’ (1917) and ‘At the Bay’ (1921) and proposing that both stories be approached in a similar way to Darrohn's reading of ‘The Garden Party’. I shall focus mostly on one of the most intriguing yet usually neglected characters appearing in both stories, the dog Snooker, recognising his presentation as a rather unconventional yet deeply genuine and moving tribute to Mansfield's brother Leslie and his fellow soldiers. The analysis of the presentation of Snooker will demonstrate how its complex symbolism links it to Mansfield's most acclaimed war story ‘The Fly’ (1922).