ago.
"But it was a bad fall and, although he picked up for a few days,
he went down hill gradually after that," his son, Peter junior,
said.

Although frail and virtually blind, Mr Casserly could still
recall recently the day in 1917 that he sailed for France at the
age of 19, dropping a bottled note to his mother into the Indian
Ocean as he departed.

The farewell message eventually washed up in Esperance and was
posted back to his mother in Fremantle.

He opposed the war that claimed nearly 61,000 Australian lives,
48,000 of them on the Western Front. And he knew 28 of the men
listed on North Fremantle's war monument as killed in action. He
marched in an Anzac Day parade at the age of 22 but it took another
84 years before he attended his second in2004. He liked to be
thought of among the last World War I veterans and a framed map of
the Western Front hung on the wall at his nursing home. But he
never joined the RSL.

Until his last few years, Mr Casserly preferred to talk about
family, work and the East Fremantle Football Club rather than his
two-and-a-half years of army service.

He left school at 13 and worked as a blacksmith's apprentice,
then as a fireman on the railways. In France, he became a sapper (a
private in the Royal Australian Engineers) at the infamous
battlefields of Ypres, Armentieres and Amiens, building and
repairing fortifications, working two kilometres behind the front
line.

After leaving the army in 1919, he worked as a labourer, opened
a wood yard and then turned his boyhood hobby of crayfishing into a
career. He had two