There was a lot of disease in the trenches. The toilets in the trenches were mainly buckets and holes. This meant that diseases like dysentery spread very quickly. Dysentery causes stomach pains and diarrhoea and sometimes sickness. The body can become very dehydrated which can cause you to die. The water supply in the trenches was not very good. They added chloride of lime to purify the dirty water that the men collected from the shell holes but the soldiers did not like the taste of the chloride of lime – it tasted a bit like our swimming pool water!