Orwell was close enough to the combat to get a serious wound. He saw many of his comrades in the POUM murdered by people supposedly on the same side.

I think maybe you are confusing him with Ernest Hemingway (another writer who wrote about Spain) whom as rumour had it 'liberated Paris from the Paris from the bar of the Ritz'


https://www.thelocal.fr/20140822/when-hemingway-took-back-the-ritz-bar